What Happened

by Clinton, Hillary Rodham

  No matter how bold and progressive my policy proposals were—and they were significantly bolder and more progressive than anything President Obama or I had proposed in 2008—Bernie would come out with something even bigger, loftier, and leftier, regardless of whether it was realistic or not. That left me to play the unenviable role of spoilsport schoolmarm, pointing out that there was no way Bernie could keep his promises or deliver real results.

  Jake Sullivan, my top policy advisor, told me it reminded him of a scene from the 1998 movie There’s Something About Mary. A deranged hitchhiker says he’s come up with a brilliant plan. Instead of the famous “eight-minute abs” exercise routine, he’s going to market “seven-minute abs.” It’s the same, just quicker. Then the driver, played by Ben Stiller, says, “Well, why not six-minute abs?” That’s what it was like in policy debates with Bernie. We would propose a bold infrastructure investment plan or an ambitious new apprenticeship program for young people, and then Bernie would announce basically the same thing, but bigger. On issue after issue, it was like he kept proposing four-minute abs, or even no-minute abs. Magic abs!

  Someone sent me a Facebook post that summed up the dynamic in which we were caught:

  BERNIE: I think America should get a pony.

  HILLARY: How will you pay for the pony? Where will the pony come from? How will you get Congress to agree to the pony?

  BERNIE: Hillary thinks America doesn’t deserve a pony.

  BERNIE SUPPORTERS: Hillary hates ponies!

  HILLARY: Actually, I love ponies.

  BERNIE SUPPORTERS: She changed her position on ponies! #WhichHillary? #WitchHillary

  HEADLINE: “Hillary Refuses to Give Every American a Pony”

  DEBATE MODERATOR: Hillary, how do you feel when people say you lie about ponies?

  WEBSITE HEADLINE: “Congressional Inquiry into Clinton’s Pony Lies”

  TWITTER TRENDING: #ponygate

  Early in the race, in 2015, there was a day when Bernie and I both happened to be in the Amtrak passenger lounge at New York’s Penn Station waiting for the train to D.C. We talked for a bit, and he said he hoped we could avoid personal attacks, including on our families. I know what that’s like. I agreed and said I hoped we could keep our debates focused on substance.

  Yet despite this pledge, as time went on, Bernie routinely portrayed me as a corrupt corporatist who couldn’t be trusted. His clear implication was that because I accepted campaign donations from people on Wall Street—just as President Obama had done—I was “bought and paid for.”

  This attack was galling for many reasons, not least because Bernie and I agreed on the issue of campaign finance reform; the need to get dark money out of politics; and the urgency of preventing billionaires, powerful corporations, and special interests from buying elections. We both supported a constitutional amendment to overturn the disastrous Supreme Court decision in Citizens United that opened the floodgates to super PACs and secret money. I also proposed new measures to boost disclosure and transparency and to match small donor contributions, based on New York City’s successful system, which would help level the playing field for everyday Americans.

  Where Bernie and I differed was that he seemed to see the dysfunction of our politics almost solely as a problem of money, whereas I thought ideology and tribalism also played significant roles. Bernie talked as if 99 percent of Americans would back his agenda if only the lobbyists and super PACs disappeared. But that wouldn’t turn small-government conservatives into Scandinavian Socialists or make religious fundamentalists embrace marriage equality and reproductive rights. I also was—and am—concerned about the Republican-led assault on voting rights, their efforts to gerrymander safe congressional districts, and the breakdown of comity in Congress. In addition to getting big money out of politics, I thought we had to wage and win the battle of ideas, while also reaching across the aisle more aggressively to hammer out compromises. That’s how we can start to break down the gridlock and actually get things done again.

  Because we agreed on so much, Bernie couldn’t make an argument against me in this area on policy, so he had to resort to innuendo and impugning my character. Some of his supporters, the so-called Bernie Bros, took to harassing my supporters online. It got ugly and more than a little sexist. When I finally challenged Bernie during a debate to name a single time I changed a position or a vote because of a financial contribution, he couldn’t come up with anything. Nonetheless, his attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump’s “Crooked Hillary” campaign.

  I don’t know if that bothered Bernie or not. He certainly shared my horror at the thought of Donald Trump becoming President, and I appreciated that he campaigned for me in the general election. But he isn’t a Democrat—that’s not a smear, that’s what he says. He didn’t get into the race to make sure a Democrat won the White House, he got in to disrupt the Democratic Party. He was right that Democrats needed to strengthen our focus on working families and that there’s always a danger of spending too much time courting donors because of our insane campaign finance system. He also engaged a lot of young people in the political process for the first time, which is extremely important. But I think he was fundamentally wrong about the Democratic Party—the party that brought us Social Security under Roosevelt; Medicare and Medicaid under Johnson; peace between Israel and Egypt under Carter; broad-based prosperity and a balanced budget under Clinton; and rescued the auto industry, passed health care reform, and imposed tough new rules on Wall Street under Obama. I am proud to be a Democrat and I wish Bernie were, too.

  Throughout the primaries, every time I wanted to hit back against Bernie’s attacks, I was told to restrain myself. Noting that his plans didn’t add up, that they would inevitably mean raising taxes on middle-class families, or that they were little more than a pipe dream—all of this could be used to reinforce his argument that I wasn’t a true progressive. My team kept reminding me that we didn’t want to alienate Bernie’s supporters. President Obama urged me to grit my teeth and lay off Bernie as much as I could. I felt like I was in a straitjacket.

  I eagerly looked forward to our first debate in October 2015. At last, that was a place where it would be appropriate to punch back. I held long prep sessions at my house to map out thrusts and parries with Jake, Ron Klain, Karen Dunn, and Bob Barnett, who played Bernie in our practice sessions.

  I was determined to use this first debate with Bernie to go straight at the core differences between us. I wanted to debunk the false charge that I wasn’t a true progressive and explain why I thought Socialism was wrong for America—and that those two propositions were in no way contradictory. It was beyond frustrating that Bernie acted as if he had a monopoly on political purity and that he had set himself up as the sole arbiter of what it meant to be progressive, despite giving short shrift to important issues such as immigration, reproductive rights, racial justice, and gun safety. I believed we could and should fight both for more equal economic opportunities and greater social justice. They go hand in hand, and it’s wrong to sacrifice the latter in the name of the former.

  As the date approached, the first debate took on added significance. Bernie was rising in the polls. Vice President Biden was considering jumping in the race. And I was set to testify before the Republican-created special congressional committee investigating the terrorist attacks in Benghazi. It seemed as if everything would come to a head during one week in October.

  In the end, Biden bowed out. The Republicans swung at me and missed at the eleven-hour-long Benghazi hearing. And the debate went better than I could have hoped.

  Beforehand, I was full of nerves but confident I had prepared as well as I possibly could and excited to finally stop biting my tongue and get in there and mix it up. I got my chance. Bernie and I clashed right out of the gate on Socialism and capitalism, whether Denmark should serve as a model for America, and what it means to be a progressive. “I lov
e Denmark,” I said (and I do), but we aren’t Denmark. “We are the United States of America. It’s our job to rein in the excesses of capitalism so that it doesn’t run amok and doesn’t cause the kind of inequities we’re seeing in our economic system. But we would be making a grave mistake to turn our backs on what built the greatest middle class in the history of the world.” My defense of the American system of free enterprise may not have helped me with those self-identified Socialists in Iowa, but what mattered to me in that moment was saying what I believed.

  The moderator, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, pressed me on whether I was really a progressive or just a squishy moderate or a shape-shifting opportunist. I explained that I had been consistent throughout my career in fighting for a set of core values and principles. “I’m a progressive,” I said, “but I’m a progressive who likes to get things done.” I thought that summed up my fundamental disagreement with Bernie fairly well.

  Still, and this is important, Bernie deserves credit for understanding the political power of big, bold ideas. His call for single-payer health care, free college, and aggressive Wall Street reform inspired millions of Americans, especially young people. After I won the nomination, he and I collaborated on a plan to make college more affordable that combined the best elements of what we’d both proposed during the primaries. That kind of compromise is essential in politics if you want to get anything done. Then we worked together to write the most progressive Democratic platform in memory.

  Bernie and I may have had different views about the role of policy—a road map for governing versus a tool for mobilization—but Donald Trump didn’t care about policy at all. He seemed proud of his ignorance and didn’t even pretend to come up with plans for how he’d build his wall, fix health care, bring back all the lost jobs in manufacturing and coal mining, and defeat ISIS. It was like he’d just wave a magic wand. He ridiculed me for taking the job seriously. “She’s got people that sit in cubicles writing policy all day,” he told Time magazine. “It’s just a waste of paper.” I kept waiting for reporters and voters to challenge him on his empty, deceitful promises. In previous elections, there was always a moment of reckoning when candidates had to show they were serious and their plans were credible. Not this time. Most of the press was too busy chasing ratings and scandals, and Trump was too slippery to be pinned down. He understood the needs and impulses of the political press well enough that if he gave them a new rabbit every day, they’d never catch any of them. So his reckoning never came.

  Trump also refused to prepare for our debates. It showed. When we went head-to-head for the first time on September 26, 2016, at Long Island’s Hofstra University, he wilted under questioning and nearly had a full-on meltdown. He tried to turn it around by attacking me for not showing up fumbling and incoherent like he did. I wasn’t having it. Yeah, I did prepare, I said. “You know what else I prepared for? I prepared to be President.”

  Later, Chuck Todd of NBC’s Meet the Press actually criticized me for being too prepared. I’m not sure how that’s possible—can you be too prepared for something so important? Does Chuck ever show up for Meet the Press and just wing it? The fact that I was up against Donald Trump—perhaps the least prepared man in history, both for the debates and for the presidency—made the comment even more puzzling. Were they so enthralled by his rabbit-a-day strategy that insults, false charges, and fact-free assertions were now the best evidence of authenticity?

  I thought about that exchange often as I watched Trump’s first hundred days in office. I even allowed myself a little chuckle when he fumed, “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” He also discovered that foreign policy is harder than it looks. The President of China had to explain the complexity of the North Korea challenge to him. “After listening for ten minutes, I realized it’s not so easy,” Trump said. Can you hear my palm slapping my forehead? Sometimes it seems like Trump didn’t even want to be President at all. “This is more work than in my previous life,” he told a reporter. “I thought it would be easier.”

  I can’t help but think about how different my first hundred days would have been. A haunting line from the nineteenth-century poet John Greenleaf Whittier comes to mind: “For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’ ”

  Trump’s first major initiative was the Muslim ban, which immediately ran into trouble in court. Mine would have been a jobs and infrastructure package funded by raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans. He failed to start building his great, beautiful wall paid for by Mexico. I would have pushed for comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship. He appointed an Attorney General whose record on civil rights was so problematic, Coretta Scott King once warned that making him a judge would “irreparably damage” the work of her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I would have worked across the aisle on bipartisan criminal justice reform—there was a real opportunity there for progress. He tried to repeal Obamacare and strip health care away from tens of millions of Americans. I would have gone after the drug companies to bring down prices and fought for a public option to get us even closer to affordable, truly universal health care. He alienated allies like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, while embracing dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin. What would I have done? There’s nothing I was looking forward to more than showing Putin that his efforts to influence our election and install a friendly puppet had failed. Our first face-to-face meeting would really have been something. I know he must be enjoying everything that’s happened instead. But he hasn’t had the last laugh yet.

  * * *

  * * *

  Since the election, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can do a better job of pushing policy back into our politics.

  I have a new appreciation for the galvanizing power of big, simple ideas. I still think my health care and college plans were more achievable than Bernie’s and that his were fraught with problems, but they were easier to explain and understand, and that counts for a lot. It’s easy to ridicule ideas that “fit on a bumper sticker,” but there’s a reason campaigns use bumper stickers: they work.

  Bernie proved again that it’s important to set lofty goals that people can organize around and dream about, even if it takes generations to achieve them. That’s what happened with universal health care. For a hundred years, Democrats campaigned on giving all Americans access to affordable, quality care. Bill and I tried to get it done in the 1990s, and we succeeded in creating CHIP, which provides coverage to millions of kids. It wasn’t until Obama was swept into office with a supermajority in the Senate that we could finally pass the Affordable Care Act. Even then, the ACA was a hodgepodge of imperfect compromises. But that historic achievement was possible only because Democrats had kept universal health care as our North Star for decades.

  There’s a historical irony here: Bill’s presidency is often associated with small-bore initiatives such as midnight basketball and school uniforms—the opposite of those big, transformative ideas that liberals dream about. But that view misses so much. I believe Bill’s impact on our party and our country was profound and transformative. He reinvented a moribund party that had lost five of the previous six presidential elections, infusing it with new energy and ideas, and proving that Democrats could be pro-growth and pro-environment, pro-business and pro-labor, pro–public safety and pro–civil rights. He reversed trickle-down economics, balanced the federal budget, challenged Americans to embrace a new ethic of national service with AmeriCorps, and presided over two terms of peace and broadly shared prosperity.

  The new Democratic Party he built went on to win the popular vote in six of the next seven elections between 1992 and 2016. He also inspired a generation of modernizing progressives in other Western democracies, especially Tony Blair’s New Labour Party in the United Kingdom. In short, there was nothing small bore about the Clinton presidency.

  I believe my presidency also would have been transformative because of the big ideas I proposed to build
an economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top. Here are a few of them:

  First, we need the biggest investment in good jobs since World War II. This should include a massive infrastructure program that repairs and modernizes America’s roads, bridges, tunnels, ports, airports, and broadband networks; new incentives to attract and support manufacturing jobs in hard-hit communities from Coal Country to Indian country; debt-free college and improved training and apprenticeship programs to help people without college degrees get higher-paying jobs; support for small business by expanding access to capital and new markets and cutting taxes and red tape; a big push to expand clean energy production, including deploying half-a-billion solar panels in four years; and major investments in scientific research to create the jobs and industries of tomorrow.

  Second, to make the economy fairer, we need new rules and incentives to make it easier for companies to raise wages and share profits with employees and harder for them to ship jobs overseas and bust unions. We have to make sure Wall Street can’t wreck Main Street again, and get smarter and tougher on trade so American workers aren’t caught in an unwinnable race against subsidized or state-owned industries, substandard labor conditions, or currency manipulation.

  Third, we have to modernize workforce protections with a higher minimum wage, equal pay for women, paid family and medical leave, and affordable childcare. We should defend and improve the Affordable Care Act to reduce prices and expand coverage, including with a public option.

  Fourth, we can pay for all of this with higher taxes on the top 1 percent of Americans who have reaped the lion’s share of income and wealth gains since 2000. This would also help reduce inequality.