6 The Nation. October 9, 2017
H
illary Clinton can’t catch a break.
“Flawed” is attached to her name
like a Homeric epithet. Never
mind that she won almost 3 mil-
lion more votes than Donald
Trump: She lost in three swing states by 80,000,
proof that she’s a horrible person who ran the worst
campaign ever. But what could you expect? She’s a
bitch and a cunt (men), or can’t-put-my-finger-on-
it-but-just-not-likable (women). She’s got a shrill
voice and thinks she’s oh-so-special. She voted for
the war in Iraq—true, so did John Kerry and Joe
Biden and that momentary darling of
the left, John Edwards, but her vote
was just... different. She supported the
1994 crime bill, which Bernie Sanders
voted for, but that was different too.
She gave those speeches to Goldman
Sachs. She’s too feminist, or not femi-
nist enough, too liberal, too conser-
vative, too tame, too outspoken, too
known a quantity—but also, who is she
really? And she’s too privileged—not
at all like Kerry, who married into millions, or, for
that matter, FDR. She was too hawkish for the left
but too female to be commander in chief for the
right—and why did she want to be president any-
way, a question asked of no man ever but which she
faced a thousand times. Whatevs! Lock her up—if
not in prison, in a retirement home. Because have
I mentioned that she is old? Just Google “creepy
grandma grin.”
Now Grandma has written a book about the
campaign, and how dare she? Nobody wants to
hear from her—except maybe the 65,844,954 peo-
ple who voted for her, the young women (yes,
young women) who waited in line all night to attend
her book launch in New York’s Union Square,
the readers who have made What Happened a No.
1 best seller, or the millions who watched her
interview with Rachel Maddow. After all, Hillary
writing a book about world-historical events on
which she has a unique perspective is nothing like
Bernie Sanders publishing a book one week after
Election Day, or Barack and Michelle Obama
getting a reported $65 million advance for their
memoirs, or any of the many other political figures
who have told their side of the story while people
still remember their names. Some actual headlines:
“Hillary, I love you. But please go away”; “Hillary,
time to exit the stage”; “Hillary Clinton Is NotSorry”; “no twinge of remorse.”
Actually, the book is one long twinge. I lost track
of the number of times Hillary blames herself. “I
felt that I had let everyone down. Because I had.”
“How did I let that happen?” she asks of the media’s
obsession with her e-mails. “I should have seen that
coming,” she says of the storm of criticism for those
lucrative speeches to bankers. “That’s on me.” “I
blamed myself. My worst fears about my limitations
as a candidate had come true.... I had been unable
to connect with the deep anger so many Americans
felt or shake the perception that I was the candi-
date of the status quo.” She spends
a whole chapter on her unsuccessful
attempt to repair the damage she did
by saying, “We’re going to put a lot
of coal miners and coal companies
out of business”—the unfortunately
blithe introduction to an empathetic
discussion of what the country owed
the miners and their communities. It
became an endlessly repeated out-of-
context sound bite and branded her as
the Cruella De Vil of the white working class.
Obviously, she should don sackcloth and ashes
and crawl into the forest to die. But no, she dares
to say that others had a part in the way the election
went: Bernie Sanders, the media, James Comey,
Russia, fake news. CNN’s Dylan Byers is bothered
by that, tweeting: “The
Hillary Clinton ‘I-take-
full-responsibility-
but-here-are-all-the-
other-reasons-I-lost’
tour continues to be
intrinsically problem-
atic.” I don’t see why.
All major events have
multiple causes. The
left focuses on her rath-
er mild jabs at Sanders,
but her other critiques
are far more serious—
and dead-on, too. The
media was at its worst: There was endless coverage
of the e-mail non-scandal (Chris Cillizza alone
wrote at least 50 columns!) and almost none of her
actual positions. While both candidates received
largely negative coverage, a curiously neglected
Harvard study shows that Trump’s platform got
more attention than his scandals, while for Hillary itHillary Clinton Tells All
We need to reckon with the story told in What Happened.
Katha Pollitt
JUSTICE
Trial and
Error
B
enjamin Rachlin’s new
book, Ghost of the In-
nocent Man: A True
Story of Trial and Redemption,
discusses the case of Willie J.
Grimes, wrongfully imprisoned
for 24 years, and documents his
long, exasperating struggle for
freedom. But Grimes’s story is
far from unique. Here are a few
statistics on unjust incarcera-
tion in the United States:
i Post-conviction DNA test-
ing leads to exoneration after a
person has spent an average of
14 years behind bars. The convic-
tions of 71 percent of these in-
nocent men and women involved
eyewitness misidentification; 41
percent of these cases involved
cross-racial misidentification.
i Innocent people in the US have
collectively served more than
18,000 years in prison since 1989.
i 47 percent of known exonerees
are black, and black people are
seven times more likely to be
wrongfully convicted of murder
than their white counterparts.
i One study estimates that at
least 4.1 percent of inmates on
death row would be exonerated if
they remained there indefinitely.
i 18 states do not compensate
exonerees for the years they’ve
spent behind bars: Alaska,
Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware,
Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas,
Kentucky, Nevada, New Mexico,
North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylva-
nia, Rhode Island, South Carolina,
South Dakota, and Wyoming.
i 74 of the 166 people who
were exonerated last year
pleaded guilty to crimes
they did not commit.
—Glyn Peterson
Hillary has
written a book
about world-
historical events
on which she
has a unique
perspective. And
why not?LEFT: AP PHOTO / CAROLYN KASTER; ILLUSTRATION: ANDY FRIEDMAN