I could go on, but that gives you a flavor of some of the things I would have tried to get done as President. Unfortunately, despite the fact that I talked about these ideas endlessly, they never got much media attention, and most people never heard about any of them. I failed to convince the press that economics was more important than emails. But it was. Just as frustrating is the fact that I never managed to convince some skeptics that I really was in it to help working families. I thought that based on my years fighting for health care reform, my record in helping create jobs as a Senator, my efforts to raise the alarm before the financial crisis, and my early commitment to address the opioid epidemic, people would see me as a proven change maker and a fighter for children and families. Instead, I never quite shook the false perception that I was a defender of the status quo.
In my more introspective moments, I do recognize that my campaign in 2016 lacked the sense of urgency and passion that I remember from ’92. Back then, we were on a mission to revitalize the Democratic Party and bring our country back from twelve years of trickle-down economics that exploded the deficit, hurt the middle class, and increased poverty. In 2016, we were seeking to build on eight years of progress. For a change-hungry electorate, it was a harder sell. More hopeful voters bought it; more pessimistic voters didn’t.
Another lesson from this election, and from the Trump phenomenon in particular, is that traditional Republican ideology is bankrupt. For decades, the big debates in American politics were about the size and role of government. Democrats argued for a more active federal government and a stronger social safety net, while Republicans argued for a smaller government, lower taxes, and fewer regulations. The country seemed fairly evenly divided, or perhaps tilted slightly to the center-right. Then Trump came along and pulled back the curtain on what was really going on. We learned that many Republican voters didn’t have any problem with big government, so long as it was big government for them. Perhaps this has always been true—you may recall the infamous sign at Tea Party rallies that read, with no hint of irony, “Keep Your Government Hands off My Medicare”—but Trump brought it out into the open. He promised to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, while abandoning free trade and getting tough on bankers, in direct contradiction of Republican orthodoxy. Instead of paying a price for it, he swept away all his more traditional GOP rivals. Once in office, Trump abandoned most of his populist promises and largely hewed to the party line. But that shouldn’t obscure the fact that many of his voters wanted to chuck the orthodoxy and preserve entitlements. The reality is that doctrinaire trickle-downers who control Congress wield enormous power without having any real constituency for their policies outside the Republican donor class. When Republicans were opposing Obama or attacking me, they could unite against a common enemy, but now that they’re in power and people actually expect them to deliver results, we’re seeing that there’s little holding the Republican Party together.
The implications of all this are potentially profound. If Trump can’t deliver for working families, Democrats have to, and be able to explain it. It may be hard for us to match his grandiose promises, because we still believe in arithmetic, but we can offer real results. We still believe in trade, but we’ve got to be clearer about how we’d be tougher on countries trying to take advantage of American workers, and how we’d provide more funding up front for people hurt by foreign competition. We still believe in immigration, but we have to make a better case that if done right it will help all working people.
Democrats should reevaluate a lot of our assumptions about which policies are politically viable. These trends make universal programs even more appealing than we previously thought. I mean programs like Social Security and Medicare, which benefit every American, as opposed to Medicaid, food stamps, and other initiatives targeted to the poor. Targeted programs may be more efficient and progressive, and that’s why during the primaries I criticized Bernie’s “free college for all” plan as providing wasteful taxpayer-funded giveaways to rich kids. But it’s precisely because they don’t benefit everyone that targeted programs are so easily stigmatized and demagogued. We’ve seen this with the Affordable Care Act. For years, it was attacked as a new subsidy for poor people of color. A lot of working-class whites didn’t think it benefited them at all, especially if they lived in states where Republican leaders refused to expand Medicaid. In white-majority states where Medicaid was expanded, such as Arkansas and Kentucky, the beneficiaries were overwhelmingly white working families. But many voted for Trump anyway, betting he would take health care away from “others” and let them keep theirs. It was only when many Americans realized that repealing the ACA would take away universal protections they had come to enjoy, especially regarding preexisting conditions, that the law became popular. Medicaid’s expansion has made it more popular, too.
The conclusion I reach from this is that Democrats should redouble our efforts to develop bold, creative ideas that offer broad-based benefits for the whole country.
Before I ran for President, I read a book called With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don’t Pay Enough, by Peter Barnes, which explored the idea of creating a new fund that would use revenue from shared national resources to pay a dividend to every citizen, much like how the Alaska Permanent Fund distributes the state’s oil royalties every year. Shared national resources include oil and gas extracted from public lands and the public airwaves used by broadcasters and mobile phone companies, but that gets you only so far. If you view the nation’s financial system as a shared resource, then you can start raising real money from things like a financial transactions tax. Same with the air we breathe and carbon pricing. Once you capitalize the fund, you can provide every American with a modest basic income every year. Besides cash in people’s pockets, it would also be a way of making every American feel more connected to our country and to one another—part of something bigger than ourselves.
I was fascinated by this idea, as was my husband, and we spent weeks working with our policy team to see if it could be viable enough to include in my campaign. We would call it “Alaska for America.” Unfortunately, we couldn’t make the numbers work. To provide a meaningful dividend each year to every citizen, you’d have to raise enormous sums of money, and that would either mean a lot of new taxes or cannibalizing other important programs. We decided it was exciting but not realistic, and left it on the shelf. That was the responsible decision. I wonder now whether we should have thrown caution to the wind and embraced “Alaska for America” as a long-term goal and figured out the details later.
Interestingly, some Republican elder statesmen such as former U.S. Treasury Secretaries James Baker and Hank Paulson recently proposed a nationwide carbon dividend program that would tax fossil fuel use and refund all the money directly to every American. They think it’s a reasonable conservative response to the problems of climate change and income inequality, and a good alternative to government regulation. Under such a plan, working families with small carbon footprints could end up with a big boost in their incomes. We looked at this for the campaign as well, but couldn’t make the math work without imposing new costs on upper-middle-class families, which I had pledged not to do. Still, it’s tantalizing. A conservative government in Sweden created a similar program in 1991, and within a decade, it had reduced greenhouse gas emissions and expanded the economy by 50 percent, because so many Swedes used their tax rebates to increase energy efficiency, thus creating new jobs, increasing productivity, and lowering their electric bills.
We need to be thinking outside the box because the challenges we face are only getting bigger and more complex. Climate change is one example. Another is the long-term effects of automation and artificial intelligence, both on employment and national security. Bear with me here, because I have a lot to say about this. Over the past few years, I’ve had a series of alarming conversations with leading technologists in Silicon Valley who warn that this could be the firs
t great technological revolution that ends up displacing more jobs than it creates. The impact of trade on our manufacturing industry received a lot more attention during the campaign, but many economists say that advances in technology actually have displaced far more jobs than trade in recent decades.
For instance, between 1962 and 2005, about four hundred thousand steelworker jobs disappeared. Competition from steel made in China and other countries was part of the problem. But technological innovation and automation were the bigger culprits. They allowed manufacturers to produce the same amount of steel with fewer and fewer workers, at lower costs.
The same story has been replicated across many industries, and it isn’t slowing down anytime soon. The arrival of self-driving cars could displace millions of truckers and taxi drivers. Some economists estimate that automation could put a third of all American men aged twenty-five to fifty-four out of work by 2050. Even if we manage to create new industries and new categories of jobs to replace those we’ve lost, the speed and breadth of the changes we’re facing will be destabilizing for millions of people.
I’m not suggesting that we should try to stop the march of technology. That would cause more problems than it solves. But we do need to make sure it’s working more for us than against us. If we can figure that out, including how to talk about it in a way that Americans will understand and support, that will be both good policy and good politics.
There’s another angle to consider as well. Technologists like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Bill Gates, and physicists like Stephen Hawking have warned that artificial intelligence could one day pose an existential security threat. Musk has called it “the greatest risk we face as a civilization.” Think about it: Have you ever seen a movie where the machines start thinking for themselves that ends well? Every time I went out to Silicon Valley during the campaign, I came home more alarmed about this. My staff lived in fear that I’d start talking about “the rise of the robots” in some Iowa town hall. Maybe I should have. In any case, policy makers need to keep up with technology as it races ahead, instead of always playing catch-up.
Across the board, we should be unafraid to kick the tires on transformative ideas. Like taxing net worth instead of annual income, which would make our system fairer, reduce inequality, and provide the resources to make the major investments our country needs. Or a national service initiative much broader than anything we have now, perhaps even universal. We should totally reimagine our training and workforce development system so that employers and unions are true partners, and people who don’t go to college can find a good job and enjoy a middle-class life. We need to completely rethink how Americans receive benefits such as retirement and health care so that they’re universal, automatic, and portable. As you probably can tell by now, I love talking about this stuff. The point is, we have to think big and think different.
No matter what I do in the years ahead, I’ll be chasing down new policy ideas that I think could make a difference. Not every election will be so filled with venom, misinformation, resentments, and outside interference as this one was. Solutions are going to matter again in politics. Democrats must be ready when that day comes.
Well-behaved women seldom make history.
—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Making History
“I just want to show you this,” said David Muir, the young ABC News anchor, as he walked me to the window. “This is the crowd that’s waiting for you.”
It was late on Tuesday, June 7, 2016, the day of the final Democratic primaries. Muir and I were on the second floor of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, in a small room crowded with cameras, hot lights, and a TV crew making final arrangements for our interview. The window looked out onto a cavernous hangar that was packed with thousands of cheering people waving American flags and stomping their feet. In the middle stood an empty stage.
“Oh my gosh,” I said, clasping my hands to my heart. “Look at that!”
“It’s eight years ago to the day that you conceded. And tonight you will go out there for a very different reason,” Muir said.
I thought back to that painful day in 2008 when I stood in front of a much more somber crowd in the National Building Museum in Washington, and thanked my supporters for putting eighteen million cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling. Now here I was, closer than ever to shattering that ceiling once and for all.
“Is it sinking in?” he asked.
“This is sinking it in, I can tell you that,” I said, pointing to the crowd below. “It’s an overwhelming feeling, David, really.”
* * *
* * *
It had been a difficult week. Heck, it had been a difficult year. The primaries had gone on longer and been far more bruising than anyone expected. The delegate math hadn’t been in question since March, but Bernie had hung on to the bitter end, drawing blood wherever he could along the way. I somewhat understood why he did it; after all, I stayed in the race for as long as I could in 2008. But that race was much closer, and I endorsed Barack right after the last primary. On this day in New York, Bernie was still more than a month away from endorsing me.
I spent the previous days campaigning like crazy in California. Even if I had the nomination locked up, I wanted to win California. I wanted to close out the primaries with a burst of enthusiasm and head toward our convention in Philadelphia with the wind at my back. The polls looked good, but I was anxious. Too many times in this campaign I had felt like Charlie Brown with the football. There had been the squeaker in Iowa and surprise losses in Michigan and Indiana. This time I wasn’t going to leave anything to chance.
That Monday, I had raced all over Southern California, holding rallies, doing local TV and radio interviews, and trying to encourage as many of my supporters as possible to get out and vote. A little after 5:00 p.m., as we were driving to yet another rally at Long Beach City College, my phone started buzzing. The Associated Press had just sent out a breaking news alert. Its reporters had been canvassing superdelegates, the party leaders who join delegates selected in primaries and caucuses in choosing the nominee at the convention. According to the AP’s latest count, I had just hit the magic number of delegates needed to win. “Hillary Clinton Becomes the Democratic Party’s Presumptive Presidential Nominee,” it declared. I had to read it twice to believe it.
You might think this was good news. I’d won! But that’s not how I felt at all. I was focused entirely on the next day’s California primary, along with the contests in Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, New Jersey, and South Dakota. This news could very well depress turnout among my supporters. And I wanted to be able to walk out onstage Tuesday night and declare victory, not have it announced in an out-of-the-blue tweet from the Associated Press the day before. I told Huma and Greg Hale, an Arkansas farmer and event-production-and-visuals wizard whom I’ve known since he was four years old, that I imagined a sea of people waving small American flags as the backdrop, and they teased me about doing my own advance work. But I had been waiting for this moment for months, and I wanted it to be perfect.
We arrived at the college in Long Beach, and I went into a makeshift greenroom. It was part of a locker room and felt like a cage. I was annoyed and not sure what to say. What was the best way to acknowledge the news in my rally speech without making too big a deal of it? I wanted to just pretend it hadn’t happened, but that didn’t seem like a viable option. Nick, who with Huma was on the phone with the rest of the team in Brooklyn, suggested a formulation. “Why not say we’re on the brink of a historic moment?” That would have to do, I grumbled.
I also was unsatisfied with the draft for the victory speech I was supposed to deliver on Tuesday night. It didn’t feel right: too small, too political, not worthy of the moment. I felt the weight of expectations and history pressing down on me.
If the primaries were over, and I was the presumptive nominee, that meant I was now all that stood between Donald Trump and the White House. It would just be me and him, one-on-one, with stake
s that couldn’t possibly be higher. Everyone would be counting on me. We absolutely had to win.
On top of all that, I was about to become the first woman ever nominated by a major party for President of the United States. That goal has been so elusive for so long. Now it was about to be real.
I’d been thinking about all the women who had marched, rallied, picketed, went to jail, and endured ridicule, harassment, and violence so that one day someone like me could come along and run for President. I thought about the brave women and men who gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 for the first great conference on women’s rights. Frederick Douglass, the African American social reformer and abolitionist, was there. He described his fellow participants as “few in numbers, moderate in resources, and very little known in the world. The most we had to connect us was a firm commitment that we were in the right and a firm faith that the right must ultimately prevail.”
Sixty-eight “ladies” and thirty-two “gentlemen” signed the Declaration of Sentiments, which asserted boldly, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and women are created equal.” All men and women. The backlash was fierce. The Seneca Falls 100 were called dangerous fanatics. They were also dismissed as batty old maids—I’m not sure how one can be both, but apparently these activists were. One newspaper declared, “These rights for women would bring a monstrous injury to all mankind.” But those brave suffragettes never lost faith.
What could I say on Tuesday night that would be worthy of that legacy and the hope that millions were now investing in me?
For a long time, the campaign had been trying to figure out the best way to talk about the historic nature of my candidacy. There were brainstorming sessions in Brooklyn, as well as polls and focus groups. Many of our core supporters were very excited by the idea of finally breaking the glass ceiling. Celebrating that could help keep people energized and motivated in the general election. But some younger women didn’t see what the big deal was. And many undecided women in battleground states didn’t want to hear about it at all. Some were afraid that by leaning into the fact that I was a woman, my campaign would end up turning away men—a disheartening but all-too-real possibility. So that wasn’t much help.
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