Here’s another misguided argument. Some of the same people who say that the reason I lost was because I didn’t have an economic message now insist that all Democrats need to do to win in the future is talk more about jobs, and then—poof!—all those Trump voters will come home. Both the premise and conclusion are false. Yes, we need to talk as much as we possibly can about creating more jobs, raising wages, and making health care and college more affordable and accessible. But that’s exactly what I did throughout 2016. So it’s not a silver bullet and it can’t be the only thing we talk about.
Democrats have to continue championing civil rights, human rights, and other issues that are part of our march toward a more perfect union. We shouldn’t sacrifice our principles to pursue a shrinking pool of voters who look more to the past than the future.
My loss doesn’t change the fact that the Democrats’ future is tied to America’s in a fast-changing world where our ability to make progress depends an increasingly diverse, educated, young electorate. Even when the headlines are bad, there’s reason to be optimistic about the trend lines. I was the first Democrat since FDR to win Orange County, California. I made historic gains in the suburbs of Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, and Charlotte, as well as in other traditionally Republican areas across the Sun Belt. Latino turnout jumped nearly 5 percent in Florida and rose in other key areas as well.
It wasn’t enough this time, but these trends hold the key to our future. That’s why the Republicans have worked so hard to keep young people and people of color away from the polls, and to gerrymander districts that protect incumbents. Democrats will have to work even harder to fight for voting rights, fair redistricting, and high turnout not just in presidential elections, but also in local, state, and federal midterm elections where the people who make the voting laws and draw congressional districts are selected.
I know we can do it. There are enough vulnerable Republican congressional seats in districts I won for Democrats to be well on their way to retaking the House in 2018, many of them in Sun Belt suburbs. And if we can flip some Midwestern blue-collar districts that went for Trump but are now disillusioned by his performance in office, all the better. We need a strategy that puts us in a position to catch a wave if it forms, and compete and win all over the country.
I do believe it’s possible to appeal to all parts of our big, diverse nation. We need to get better at explaining to all Americans why a more inclusive society with broadly shared growth will be better and more prosperous for everyone. Democrats must make the case that expanding economic opportunity and expanding the rights and dignity of all people can never be either/or, but always go hand in hand. I tried to do this in 2016. That was the whole point of “Stronger Together.” And it’s why I emphasized my commitment to help create jobs in every zip code, in neglected urban neighborhoods and in small Appalachian towns. That vision did win the popular vote by nearly three million (yes, I’m going to keep mentioning that). Unfortunately, zero-sum resentment proved more powerful than positive-sum aspiration in the places where it mattered most. But that doesn’t mean we give up. It means we have to keep making the case, backed up by bold new policy ideas and renewed commitment to our core values.
As for me, I’m sure I’ll keep replaying in my head for a long time what went wrong in this election. As I said in my concession speech, it’s going to be painful for quite a while. None of the factors I’ve discussed here lessen the responsibility I feel or the aching sense that I let everyone down. But I’m not going to sulk or disappear. I’m going to do everything I can to support strong Democratic candidates everywhere. If you’re reading this book, I hope you’ll do your part, too.
If our expectations—if our fondest prayers and dreams are not realized—then we should all bear in mind that the greatest glory of living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time you fall.
—Nelson Mandela
Resilience
Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind.
The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
—Henry James
Love and Kindness
Politics has always been a rough business. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams hurled insults at each other that would make today’s nastiest politicians blush. It’s just how the game is played: Every campaign seeks to draw contrasts with opponents and the media want to cover conflict. So it’s not surprising that two words you don’t hear very often in our knock-down, drag-out political brawls are love and kindness. But you heard them from our campaign.
It started as something I’d occasionally mention at the end of speeches, how our country needed compassion and a spirit of community in a time of division. It eventually became a rallying cry: “Love trumps hate!” Partly this was because the race felt ugly and mean and we wanted to be an antidote to that. But partly it was because I’ve been thinking for a long time about how our country needs to become kinder and all of us need to become more connected to one another. That’s not just a sweet thought. It’s serious to me. If I had won the election, this would have been a quiet but important project of my presidency.
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A few weeks after the election, I picked up a copy of a sermon called “You Are Accepted” by Paul Tillich, the Christian theologian of the mid-twentieth century. I remembered sitting in my church basement in Park Ridge years ago as our youth minister, Don Jones, read it to us. “Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness . . . Sometimes at that moment, a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: ‘You are accepted.’ ” Years later, when my marriage was in crisis, I called Don. Read Tillich, he said. I did. It helped.
Tillich says about grace: “It happens; or it does not happen. And certainly it does not happen if we try to force it upon ourselves.” This stuck with me. “Grace happens. Grace happens.” In other words, be patient, be strong, keep going, and let grace come when it can.
Now I was sixty-nine and reading Tillich again. There was more here than I remembered. Tillich says sin is separation and grace is reconciliation—it’s “being able to look frankly into the eyes of another . . . understanding each other’s words . . . not merely the literal meaning of the words, but also that which lies behind them, even when they are harsh or angry.” After a divisive election, this resonated in a new way. A lot of Americans were estranged from one another. Reconciliation seemed far away. The whole country was seething. Before the election, it felt as if half the people were angry and resentful, while the other half was still fundamentally hopeful. Now pretty much everyone is mad about something.
Tillich published his sermon the year after I was born. Sometimes people describe the postwar years as a golden age in America. But even then, he sensed a “feeling of meaninglessness, emptiness, doubt, and cynicism—all expressions of despair, of our separation from the roots and the meaning of our life.” That could just as easily be America in 2016. How many shrinking small towns and aging Rust Belt cities did I visit over the past two years where people felt abandoned, disrespected, invisible? How many young men and women in neglected urban neighborhoods told me they felt like strangers in their own land because of the color of their skin? The alienation cut across race, class, geography. Back in 1948, Tillich was concerned that technology had removed “the walls of distance, in time and space” but strengthened “walls of estrangement between heart and heart.” If only he could have seen the internet!
How are we supposed to love our neighbors when we feel like this? How are we supposed to find the grace that Tillich says comes with reconciliation and acceptance? How can we build the trust that holds a democracy together?
Underneath these questions are ones I’ve been wrestling with and writing and speaking about for decades.
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It started in college. Like a lot of kids, I felt stifled by the conservative, dollar-crazed conformity of the Mad Men era. That scene in
The Graduate where an older man pulls Dustin Hoffman aside and, with great seriousness, shares the secret of life in one word—“Plastics”—made all of us groan. It’s no wonder so many of us were looking for meaning and purpose wherever we could find them. As I put it in my Wellesley graduation speech, we were “searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.” (Yes, I’m aware of how idealistic that sounds, but that’s how we talked!) I didn’t know quite how to put it into words, but what many of us wanted was an integrated life that blended and balanced family, work, service, and a spiritual connection all together. We wanted to feel like we were part of something bigger than ourselves—certainly something bigger than “plastics.”
Surprisingly, I found some of what I was looking for not in a New Age manifesto but in a very old book.
In one of my political science classes, I read Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. He came from France and traveled across the United States in the 1830s trying to understand what made our young nation work. He was amazed by the social and economic equality and mobility he saw here, unheard of in aristocratic Europe, and by what he called our “habits of the heart,” the everyday values and customs that set Americans apart from the rest of the world. He described a nation of volunteers and problem solvers who believed that their own self-interest was advanced by helping one another. Like Benjamin Franklin, they formed volunteer fire departments, because they realized that if your neighbor’s house is on fire, it’s your problem, too. Middle-class women—including a lot of Methodists—went into the most dangerous nineteenth-century slums to help poor children who had no one else standing up for them. Those early Americans came together, inspired by religious faith, civic virtue, and common decency, to lend a hand to those in need and improve their communities. They joined clubs and congregations, civic organizations and political parties, all kinds of groups that bound a diverse country together. De Tocqueville thought that spirit made America’s great democratic experiment possible.
Those “habits of the heart” felt distant to me in the turmoil of the 1960s. Instead of pitching in to raise a barn or sew a quilt—or clean up a park or build a school—Americans seemed always to be at one another’s throats. And a pervasive loss of trust was undermining the democracy de Tocqueville had celebrated 130 years before. Reading his observations helped me realize that my generation didn’t need to totally reinvent America to fix the problems we saw and find the meaning we sought, we just had to reclaim the best parts of our national character. That started, I told my classmates in my graduation speech, with “mutuality of respect between people,” another clunky phrase but still a pretty good message.
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Fast-forward twenty years, to early 1991. I’d gotten what I’d always dreamed of—a loving family, a fulfilling career, and a life of service to others—plus more that I had never imagined. I was the First Lady of Arkansas. Every part of that statement would have surprised my college-age self. Now my husband was thinking about running for President of the United States. I didn’t know if he could win—George H. W. Bush’s approval rating surpassed 90 percent after winning the Gulf War—but I was sure the country needed him to try. The Reagan years had rebuilt America’s confidence but sapped its soul. Greed was good. Instead of a nation defined by “habits of the heart,” we had become a land of “sink or swim.” Bush had said some of the right things, calling for a “kinder, gentler” country and celebrating the generosity of our civil society as “a thousand points of light.” But conservatives used that as an excuse for government to do even less to help the less fortunate. It’s easy to forget what this was like. Now that the Republican Party has moved so far to the extreme right in the years since, the 1980s have taken on a retrospective halo of moderation by comparison. And it’s true that Reagan gave amnesty to undocumented immigrants, and Bush raised taxes and signed the Americans with Disabilities Act. But their trickle-down economic policies exploded the deficit and hurt working families. I thought they were wrong on most issues, and still do.
In those days, I still read Life magazine, and in the February 1991 issue, I came across something that caught me totally by surprise. It was an article by Lee Atwater, the Republican mastermind who’d helped elect Reagan and Bush with slash-and-burn campaigns that played to our country’s worst impulses and ugliest fears. He was the man behind the infamous race-baiting “Willie Horton” ad in 1988, the man who believed in winning at any cost. He was also mortally ill with brain cancer and not yet forty years old.
Atwater’s piece in Life magazine read like a death-bed conversion. The bare-knuckled political brawler was having an attack of conscience. And despite coming from someone with whom I disagreed about virtually everything, it was like reading my own thoughts printed out on the page. Here’s what he wrote that made such a big impression on me:
Long before I was struck with cancer, I felt something stirring in American society. It was a sense among the people of the country, Republicans and Democrats alike, that something was missing from their lives—something crucial. I was trying to position the Republican Party to take advantage of it. But I wasn’t exactly sure what it was. My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me. A little heart, a lot of brotherhood.
The ’80s were about acquiring—acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn’t I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn’t I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye-to-eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime.
I don’t know who will lead us through the ’90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society—this tumor of the soul.
This was exactly how I felt! Atwater was getting to a question that had been gnawing at me for years. Why, I wondered, in the wealthiest, most powerful country on earth, with the oldest, most successful democracy, did so many Americans feel like we lacked meaning in our individual lives and in our collective national life? What was missing, it seemed to me, was a sense that our lives were part of some greater effort, that we were all connected to one another and that each of us had a place and a purpose.
This was part of why I thought Bill should run for President. Filling America’s “spiritual vacuum” wasn’t a job for government, but it would help to have strong, caring leadership. Bill was starting to think about how to root a campaign in the values of opportunity, responsibility, and community. Eventually he’d call it a “new covenant,” a biblical concept. He hoped it would speak to this feeling, articulated so well by Atwater, that something important was missing in the heart of American life.
I cut out the Life magazine article and showed it to Bill.
(I wonder what Lee Atwater would say about Donald Trump. Would he admire the chutzpah of a campaign that stopped blowing dog whistles and spoke its bigotry in plain English for all to hear? Or would he see Trump as the embodiment of everything he hated about the eighties: one big tumor of the American soul?)
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Fast-forward again, this time to April 1993. My eighty-two-year-old father was lying in a coma in St. Vincent’s Hospital in Little Rock. It had been two weeks since he suffered a massive stroke. All I wanted to do was keep sitting by his bedside, hold his hand, smooth his hair, and wait and hope for him to open his eyes or squeeze my fingers. But nobody knew how long his coma would last, and Chelsea had to get back to school in Washington. For reasons passing understanding, I also had a commitment I couldn’t get out of: a speech to fourteen thousand people at the University of Texas at Austin.
I was, to put it mildly, a wreck. On the plane to Austin, I leafed through the little book I keep of quotations, Scripture, and poems, trying to figure out what I could possibly say.
Then I turned the page and saw the cutout from Lee Atwater’s Life article. Something missing from our lives, a spiritual vacuum—this is what I would talk about. It wouldn’t be the most articulate or coherent speech I’d ever given, but at least it would come straight from my wounded heart. I began sketching out a new appeal for the “mutuality of respect” I’d talked about in my graduation speech at Wellesley, a return to de Tocqueville’s “habits of the heart.”
When I got to Texas, I spoke about the alienation, despair, and hopelessness I saw building just below the surface of American life. I quoted Atwater. And to his question—“Who will lead us out of this spiritual vacuum?”—I answered, “all of us.” We needed to improve government and strengthen our institutions, and that’s what the new Clinton administration was trying to do, but it wouldn’t be enough. “We need a new politics of meaning,” I said, “a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring.” And that would take all of us doing our part to build “a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.” I cited de Tocqueville and talked about the importance of networks of family, friendship, and communities that are the glue that hold us together.
There had been so much change in our country, a lot of it positive but also much of it profoundly unsettling. The social and cultural upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, followed by the economic and technological shifts of the 1980s and 1990s, with the rise of automation, income inequality, and the information economy, all of it seemed to be contributing to a spiritual hollowing out. “Change will come whether we want it or not, and what we have to do is to try and make change our friend, not our enemy,” I said.
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