Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign
The Democratic Convention, anti-Russian hysteria, and Clinton’s concession
Part Two
By
Eric London
27 May 2017
Part One of this review of Shattered followed the Democratic Party primary elections from 2015 through mid-2016. Part Two traces the Clinton and Sanders campaigns from the Democratic National Convention to the November election.
Sanders and Clinton at the Convention
Shattered provides details of the collaboration between the Clinton and Sanders campaigns and the Obama White House, which expose the Vermont senator’s political cowardice and the thuggery and corruption of the Democratic Party leadership. Sanders’s performance at the convention confirms his role in preventing masses of workers and youth with a growing interest in socialism from breaking with the Democratic Party.
Obama personally met with Sanders after his defeat in the California primary and urged him to end his campaign and support Clinton. Sanders “irritated” Obama, according to the authors, and the president “could be heard grumbling about” comparisons between his own 2008 campaign and Sanders’s 2016 run. Obama “seldom failed to let his annoyance show.”
During their meeting, Obama said “he didn’t want Democrats to lose what Bernie had brought to the table—and not just because he wanted Hillary to win. Obama and Sanders shared a capacity to bring more people into the political system. The two men spent some of their hour-long meeting brainstorming ways that the Democratic Party could sustain the energy of Bernie’s campaign both in the election and in helping to move public policy debates with grassroots engagement.”
The Democratic Party used Sanders to “bring more…