Poor pursued Hillary

‘They Were Never Going to Let Me Be President’

Speaking of the Electoral College, no doubt, since she won the majority of voters by some three to five millions.

Robby Mook, the drained and deflated campaign manager, told his boss she was going to lose. 

She didn’t seem all that surprised.

“I knew it. I knew this would happen to me,” she said, now within a couple of inches of Mr. Mook’s ashen face. 

“They were never going to let me be president.”

But nope.

I figured that if anyone knew whom Mrs. Clinton was referring to with that insidious “they” that, like some invisible army of adversaries (real and imagined), wielded its collective power and caused her to lose the most winnable presidential election in modern history, it was me.

They were the vast-right wing conspiracy. 

They were the patriarchy that could never let an ambitious former first lady finally shatter “that highest, hardest glass ceiling.” 

They were the people of Wisconsin and James Comey. 

They were white suburban women who would rather vote for a man who bragged about sexual assault than a woman who seemed an affront to who they were.

And yes, they were political reporters (“big egos and no brains,” she called us) hounding her about her emails and transfixed by the spectacle of the first reality TV show candidate.

. . . .

I’ve started to see the “they” she spoke about on election night differently.

They were Facebook algorithms and data breaches. 

They were Fake News drummed up by Vladimir Putin’s digital army. 

They were shadowy hackers who stole her campaign chairman’s emails hoping to weaken our democracy with Mr. Podesta’s risotto recipe. 

And they were The Times and me and all the other journalists who covered those stolen emails.

Of course, these outside forces wouldn’t have mattered or weighed so heavily on me, on the country, had Hillary Clinton, her campaign and her longtime aides — the same box of broken toys who’d enabled all of her worst instincts since the 1990s — not let the election get so close in the first place. 

The Russians, after all, didn’t hack into her calendar and delete the Wisconsin rallies.