Why Did Hillary Clinton Lose?

First, there was the mountain.

Hillary Clinton entered the race for the Democratic presidential nomination sixteen months ago with higher negative ratings and lower approval ratings than any major candidate in history. While hardcore Democrats liked the former First Lady, other Americans were more wary.

Or even hostile. They were represented to me by the legion of progressive women, anxious to vote for a Democratic nominee this year, who have told me, “I will never vote for Hillary Clinton. She can’t be trusted.”

Fair or not, these women and other voters, were part of the mountain Clinton tried to scale, hoping to win over just a few of these Hillaryskeptics, adding them to her core constituency to form a winning coalition for the Democratic nomination.

But that optimistic strategy ran into a second snag: the wall.

In 1968, Earl Mazo and Stephen Hess released their biography of Richard Nixon. No campaign puff job, it sought to comprehend and convey the real Nixon. It’s been forty years since I read the book and I know longer own it, but I recall that it began with a brief vignette from the years between Nixon’s disastrous run for California governor in 1962 and his bid for the presidency in 1968. A fire hit Nixon’s home and some enterprising news photographer had arrived on the scene. He snapped a candid picture of the former Vice President. But, uncertain whether the photograph he’d captured in that pre-digital era was a good one, he asked Nixon to pose. Back in the dark room, the photographer was surprised to make a discovery. The candid shot looked posed, the posed shot looked spontaneous. Although Nixon’s true character would eventually catch up to him and bring him down ignominiously in 1974, he apparently had mastered the art of faux self-disclosure.

Clinton, to her credit, has never achieved such mastery....continue