Jonathan Allen > Quotes

“She’d gone on the attack against a better-liked rival whose platform more closely mirrored the values of the party’s base, creating a boomerang effect on her personal standing. Perhaps”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“campaign aides came to believe that there was a big and telling difference between the disclosure of DNC e-mails earlier in the summer and the reveal of the Podesta rounds. Rather than a massive, untargeted one-time release, this time there seemed to be greater political sophistication in the slow-burn method of daily releases for the final month of the campaign—and the Podesta e-mails were presented in an easily searchable format. The biggest difference they detected was that WikiLeaks had seemed to acquire a close enough understanding of American domestic politics to time its releases and publish e-mails on days when they would have greater relevance in the news.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“She believed her campaign had failed her—not the other way around—and she wanted “to see who was talking to who, who was leaking to who,” said”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“In the summer of 2008, years before her private e-mail server became a campaign issue, Hillary learned about the power of digital snooping. At the time, she was conducting an autopsy of her failed bid against Barack Obama, and she wanted an honest accounting of what had gone wrong. So she instructed a trusted aide to access the campaign’s server and download the messages sent and received by top staffers.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Hillary began to home in on one line of inquiry. Do I have to build a big national footprint or can I rely on the Democratic National Committee, state parties, and outside groups to shoulder some of the burden?”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Between the Benghazi Committee, which would take depositions from Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, and Jake Sullivan among other Hillary aides, the drip-drip nature of evolving federal lawsuits, and judicial orders for the State Department to release Hillary’s e-mails on a rolling basis, the early months of the campaign became a private and public hell. It was only a matter of time before voters would know that Hillary had not told the truth about not sending or receiving classified information.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“If something does not directly differentiate you from your competition and drive business value creation, see if there is an AWS building block that can take care of it for you. There probably is. Then use that building block instead of wasting your time and effort recreating something that is a utility.”
― Jonathan Allen, Reaching Cloud Velocity: A Leader's Guide to Success in the AWS Cloud

“Eleven stories above Brooklyn Heights in a 659,000-square-foot building that also housed Morgan Stanley and the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, Hillary’s top aides were as miserable as midlevel bureaucrats in an agency with no clear plans for how to attain its mission. They”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“If Hillary was a candidate often isolated from her formal campaign—and she was—Abedin was the croc-filled moat encircling her. The”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“herself to Moore. “I don’t understand what’s happening with the country. I can’t get my arms around it,” Hillary confided. Moore just listened. “How do I get answers to this?” Hillary asked. It was a quandary that would plague her throughout the campaign. After nearly a year on the campaign trail, and hundreds of stops at diners, coffee shops, and high school gymnasiums and just as many roundtables with young professionals and millworkers, Hillary still couldn’t figure out why Americans were so angry or how she could bring the country together. She”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Nor was anyone empowered to both enforce Hillary’s will and tell her when she was wrong without fear of reprisal.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Hillary’s campaign was so spirit-crushing that her aides eventually shorthanded the feeling of impending doom with a simple mantra: We’re not allowed to have nice things.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Both archetypes were familiar in Clintonworld: the cold-eyed, self-serving strategists who build up themselves by building up one Clinton or both and the sycophants who prove their loyalty to a Clinton by devoting their entire lives to the family. Hillary wanted them to coexist. But”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Throughout the primary, he’d report back from the field on what he was hearing at campaign events and from friends across the country. Mook’s response was always a variation on the same analysis: the data run counter to your anecdotes.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Ultimately, it was a battle between those who believed that it was folly to think Hillary could show up in lower-population areas and change hearts and minds and those who believed, just as firmly, that politics and Hillary’s path to victory were fundamentally about doing just that. That elemental split hung over nearly every internal skirmish over strategy and tactics—from”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“The candidate would blame her staff for failing to contain the damage, and, privately, they would fault her for failing to take the steps necessary to do that.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“For Biden, as for other Democrats who had considered running in 2016, Hillary’s ability to co-opt the major institutions, political leaders, operatives, and financiers of the Democratic Party was deeply frustrating.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“After the 2008 campaign, two of her aides, Kris Balderston and Adrienne Elrod, had toiled to assign loyalty scores to members of Congress, ranging from one for the most loyal to seven for those who had committed the most egregious acts of treachery. Bill Clinton had campaigned against some of the sevens in subsequent primary elections, helping to knock them out of office. The fear of retribution was not lost on the remaining sevens, some of whom rushed to endorse Hillary early in the 2016 cycle.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“After years of watching adversaries comb through her public records for any hint of a scandal, and after accessing her own aides’ e-mails, Hillary well understood the danger of exposing her own private thoughts to scrutiny. And that was reason enough to want them shielded from political enemies, journalists, and the public.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Mook was already operating inside a framework first developed for Hillary by David Plouffe, President Barack Obama’s longtime strategist, who had put together a preliminary memo for Hillary in December 2013. As Obama’s campaign manager in 2008, Plouffe had despised Clinton; that he was now advising her was an important signal of just how completely she would co-opt the Democratic establishment even before she began running. Plouffe”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“No, Schale explained, Trump’s numbers weren’t just big, they were unreal. In rural Polk County, smack-dab in the center of the state, Hillary would collect 3,000 more votes than Obama did in 2012—but Trump would add more than 25,000 votes to Mitt Romney’s total. In Pasco County, a swath of suburbs north of Tampa–St. Petersburg, Trump outran Romney by 30,000 votes. Pasco was one of the counties Schale was paying special attention to because the Tampa area tended to attract retirees from the Rust Belt—folks whose political leanings reflected those of hometowns in the industrial Midwest. In”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“And she didn’t want the first major address of what could be a history-making campaign to be set against a minimalistic backdrop like some farmer’s back porch.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“The group’s lists had value, and lawyers for Ready for Hillary and the Clinton campaign would spend weeks planning how they could legally transfer all the data from the super PAC to the campaign. In”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Podesta had just left the Peninsula for the Javits Center. He went over because the campaign’s contract expired at 2:30 a.m., which was nearing, and there was still no decision from Hillary on what she wanted to do, other than avoid giving a public concession speech that night.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“But the idea burned into her mind as much as anything else was that she had lost because she’d hired people who put their own interests above getting her elected. The”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Clinton’s aides didn’t know that batches of Podesta’s e-mails would be released day after day from October 7 until November 7, the last day before the election. Nor could they have imagined that the intelligence finding of Russian interference in the election would so quickly get drowned out by the combination of the Trump Access Hollywood video and the Podesta e-mails.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“As she had at State, Abedin concerned herself with elements of the operation for which she had no credentials. But”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Whatever strange brew led Parkhomenko to focus his entire life on Hillary’s ascent, it”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“portentous answer”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign