The NPR Politics Podcast - Clinton Book Review And Irma Update

Episode Date: September 12, 2017

Hillary Clinton is back with a book to talk about "what happened." Also, an update on Hurricane Irma. This episode: Guest host/White House reporter Geoff Bennett, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben and political editor Domenico Montanaro. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Juan, a Spaniard working and living in Brussels, Belgium. This podcast was recorded at 12.12pm on Tuesday, September 12th. Things may have changed by the time you listen to this. To keep up with the latest NPR news, check out NPR.org or download the NPR app or listen to your local NPR radio station. Alright, here's the show. It's the NPR Politics Podcast, and today Hillary Clinton is back. She's out with her new book, her 469-page account of what happened in the 2016 presidential race. That's actually the name of the book, What Happened, and Clinton has had a lot of time to think about that over the last 10 months.

You know, I take ultimate responsibility for the loss. I was the candidate. I was the person whose name was on the ballot. And I'll never, you know, I'll never get over that. But she does also blame former FBI Director James Comey, Russia's interference in the 2016 election, Bernie Sanders, more restrictive voter ID laws, and sexism. We'll get into all of that and what else is in the book, but before we get to that, we'll check in on the Florida Keys, which were worst hit by Hurricane Irma. I'm Jeff Bennett. I cover the White House for NPR.

I'm Tamara Keith. I also cover the White House. I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. And I'll say here that I'm hosting today because Tam has read Hillary Clinton's new book and recently interviewed her. So she has a lot to tell us. Yeah. And it was a interesting way to spend my vacation. Tam and I have gotten some some speed reading practice in the last few days. Danielle also read it. I'm not generally very fast. And we know Danielle has read the book because we're staring at the dog-eared and multi-tabbed. If you can hear this, this is me sort of running my hand across the Post-its on my book.

It's epic. I had to take notes to make sure I remembered it all. So before we get to Hillary Clinton, let's talk about the big story in the news this week. That's Hurricane Irma, which tore a path of destruction across Florida and, of course, parts of the Caribbean. And we have NPR's Connor Donovan with us. He joins us from Miami. Hey, Connor. Hey, how are you doing? So, Connor, you flew over some of the worst hit areas along the west coast of the state and the Keys, right? So tell us about it. Right. So this is one of those flyovers that politicians sometimes do with, you know,

like the Coast Guard or the Navy or the Air Force to get a view of the disaster. Rick Scott had been on one earlier in the day, and this one had the Florida senators, Marco Rubio and Bill Nelson. It also had the representative who represents the Florida Keys, which was the hardest hit area, and some other local politicians aboard. So they were just kind of going on this trip in this Coast Guard, basically troop transport plane to kind of get a look at some of the damage and then to land at the Naval Air Station Key West, which is on Boca Chica, which is one of the keys, to kind of get out and take a look at the damage to the base and some of the surrounding areas. So from your vantage point, above all that destruction, what did you see? So, you know, from 2,000 feet up, you don't see a ton. So you really only see the worst damage. So we started, we kind of went down the west coast of Florida, which people were worried was going to be hit really hard. Fort Myers, Naples, Marco

Island. But you couldn't see a lot of structural damage in that area. And the guy on the plane, I was with the U.S. Coast Guard officer, he was a guy named Rear Admiral Peter Brown, said that that was kind of a lot better than they were expecting. You know, this area was projected to get something like 10 to 15 feet of storm surge. And so the fact that they didn't end up with that much damage was a relief for a lot of these people. But then we headed down to the Keys. We started in an area called Marathon. It's a city that's on a bunch of islands.

You could see a lot of damage there. There were homes with their roofs ripped off, kind of some property damage type stuff. And then from there, we flew to the Lower Keys, which were another really hard hit area. And this is basically, you know, the Florida Keys are this kind of string of islands. And so we're flying, if you can visualize it, east to west. And between Marathon and the Lower Keys, there's this seven-mile bridge. It's this long bridge over the ocean, basically. And the rear admiral that I was with, one of the striking things I saw was kind of this, you could see a single car on that bridge just driving along in this vast stretch of ocean.

And he was saying that's a good sign that there's any traffic on that bridge at all because once they start getting supplies in here that's going to be kind of a pretty important route. I just want to jump in and ask you know I don't know if have you heard from anybody down there do you have a sense of the destruction from Hurricane Irma as opposed to, say, Hurricane Andrew way back when? Sure. I mean, it's early. It's early to know still. Like, we just got this report from the FEMA director who said that 25 percent of houses were destroyed. Nearly all were affected in some way. In the Keys.

In the Keys. And it's hard to know from the air. You did see the thing that you saw that was most striking was these trailer parks that had, it looked like they had just been literally stirred up. I mean, the trailers were tossed all over the place. You have to like hope that no one stuck around in those because it's really hard to imagine anyone surviving. There were boats everywhere,

kind of just thrown up on land that had kind of sprung from their moorings and been tossed around. You could see a lot of damage. And then we actually landed at Naval Air Station Key West, which is on Boca Chica, and we kind of drove around there and got to see some of the damage. Now, Key West wasn't hit as hard as some of the other keys, but you got to see up close some of that damage that we were looking at from above. And it looks just so much more intense on the ground. Did you get a chance to talk to anybody? Yeah, you know, I talked to

Carlos Curbelo. He is the Republican representative who represents the Florida Keys in the house. And I asked him kind of what struck him most about everything that we were seeing. And here's what he said. Just to kind of see the Florida Keys dark, so to speak, is such a vibrant, exciting part of our country that I'm blessed to represent. And to just see everything kind of at a standstill and for Key West to be a ghost town, that was very striking for me. And it really was, I mean, Key West was kind of eerie. You were driving around, there was all these downed trees and power lines. A lot of the roads were impassable. You could see kind of evidence of the evacuations. There were all these cars parked up on highway overpasses, dozens of

cars that had just been left there because people were afraid of this storm surge and wanted to kind of get them on high ground. Well that's kind of clever. These people know hurricanes, right? And so I kind of assume that's kind of a tried and true method. The Coast Guard officer who took us around Key West did say that they got about four feet of water. All of the base housing they thought was actually in pretty good shape. It's kind of sturdily built stuff, as you might imagine, but we did see a lot of damage on the ground. There was like a gas station whose canopy and pumps had basically just crumpled in a heap. There was a marina that we drove past named Hurricane

Hole, and it surprisingly did pretty well. You could see there were kind of some boats up on racks, and they looked to be in place for the most part. Oh, the irony. So it was kind of depending where you were in the Keys, you saw more or less damage. The other thing that was surprising is there were people there. There were people kind of out and about besides the Coast Guard folks we were with.

There were, you know, you saw probably a dozen cars driving, people on the roads on mopeds, people just kind of walking around. But, you know, the big concern is that these islands, or many of these islands, still don't have power, water, cell service, which makes just life extremely difficult. In fact, actually, as our plane was taking off, we took a little longer than expected, I guess, on this drive around. And the Coast Guard people were all like shooing us back onto the plane because we had to take off before sunset. There weren't lights on the runway. So we were probably three minutes away, maybe I'll say 10, 15 minutes away from getting stuck on Boca Chica overnight. So, Connor, what now? You were there with members of Congress. What are they looking for? Right. So Carlos Curbelo in particular was very adamant that there needed to be robust funding of FEMA was the word he used. He said we can't fund FEMA month to month. That is something that he said he was going to talk

to Paul Ryan about, he was going to urge his colleagues to do. It's interesting because Marco Rubio has also called for FEMA funding for Irma recovery, and he's taken a lot of heat because he voted against a 2013 bill for relief for Hurricane Sandy. Carlos Curbelo, who's also a Republican, was actually not in Congress at that time. Who knows what way he voted, he would have voted, but he does not have to worry. He does not have to worry about his voting record that far back. The luxury of being a relatively fresh-faced representative. That's NPR's Connor Donovan joining us from Miami. Connor, thanks.

Thank you guys. It was a pleasure. And Tam, as I said, we're doing this little switch today with me guest hosting because you have a lot to tell us about Hillary Clinton's new book and your interview with her this week. And the first question I have to ask you is whose idea was it to interview her in the woods? Well, I think it

was my idea. Basically, right around the time of Thanksgiving, I shot off an email to her team and said, you know, when Hillary Clinton is ready to emerge and talk about what she thinks happened, I would like to do like the most stereotypical public radio story that involves the sound of crunching leaves and Hillary Clinton in the woods. You know how to reach me. The crunching of the leaves wasn't just because you randomly thought like this is great public radio idea. It's also because you read some stuff about her. Yes.

Well, so she had been. It became a thing. It had become a meme that HRC in the wild. People were running into Hillary Clinton out in the woods as she was walking around reflecting, you know, wearing fleece and sweatpants. Well, they had run into her and then they started like hunting her, like trying to find her in the woods, right? Yeah. And I asked her about that. Were they looking for you? They were after that first encounter because the young woman I met on the trail posted the picture of me with her and her baby, and it went on her Facebook page.

And then people started writing about it, and it became a kind of funny hunt. So one time we drove up here to go for a walk, and there were about a dozen people lying in wait. And I thought, okay, we're going to go somewhere more peaceful than that. Other times we'd be walking and along come some people and they'd say, oh, we found you. So it was it was very sweet. And it really helped me to, you know, get some, you know, other people talking to me and telling me how they were feeling. And Danielle, you you read her book and you reviewed it, which I read this morning, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Yeah, I mean, like, you know, the book, it's hard to categorize. It's not fully a memoir. Yes, she talks about her time on the campaign trail, but she also gets into analysis. She talks about some of her policies at relatively good length. She has a whole chapter on the emails in all caps. But the sense that I definitely got from this book is the sense of a woman who, like the what happened on the cover, I feel like it should be followed by a few exclamation points and question marks. I feel like she really, after the election, was asking herself,

what just happened? And you get the sense that she sat, she thought about it. She sat down at her computer and I kind of said this in my review and it just seems like she sat down and this all just poured out. She had a lot to say after having thought about it and really after having maintained her composure through two years of a ridiculous campaign. So she says she wants to stick around and be part of the spotlight and have some piece of a potential solution for Democrats, whether it's 2018 or beyond. Not her running. She's definitely not running anymore. She says she's not running.

Totally. But she wants to still have her voice out there and be a figure in the party. Danielle, what was your thesis as far as who she wrote the book for and why she wrote this book? My thesis is that it doesn't matter who she wrote the book for is the general feeling, right? Because, you know, she wrote it in part, like, as I say in my article and in my headline, to unburden this, to sit down and say, all right, deep breath. Here it all is. I'm going to vomit this all out.

And it is not word vomit. It does read quite well. I'll say a couple of things. One, this book is a historical artifact, I think. What you have here is the first woman to run as the major party candidate in a presidential election. She is writing down what happened, how that went. She's telling her experience of it. Absolutely. Because we heard this election dissected from every single angle. And now a person at the center of the maelstrom, we're finally hearing her side of it because we did hear Donald Trump's side of it throughout the election via his Twitter account. Yeah,

she was not narrating during the campaign in the same way. In fact, you know, I asked her during the interview, I was I was like, you know, I've read your other books. I followed your campaign. This person, this person who's more forthcoming, who talks about drinking vodka and Chardonnay, who who talks about sexism, who this person was not running for president. Like what changed? Her answer was, well, I'm done now. But didn't Hillary Clinton learn that lesson after the New Hampshire primary in 2008, where she was in that deli or coffee shop or whatever, and she started to tear up and everyone said, this is the real Hillary Clinton. She's emoting.

She's a real person. And I think she won the primary, right? Yeah. Well, that time in New Hampshire. Well, that time. But wasn't that like, I don't know. I just, I feel like that should have been. Well, I mean, if she's even saying that there's this dissonance between the writer that

she is and the person that we heard a lot of people who are close to her talk about uh on the campaign trail and otherwise behind the scenes saying how warm she was in person and how much they liked her how funny she is right and and i haven't read the book but the excerpts that i've seen the fuller excerpts the book seems punchy It seems brightly written. She seems to have a way of punctuating sentences with, you know, making a point. Right. And it's it is funny. I mean, to Jeff's point, you know, if she's saying admitting that she is more herself in this writing and she never was able to be comfortable enough in her own skin as a candidate. To that point, I was joking with Glenn Weldon, the books editor. We were both reading through this book.

And I said, you know, an alternate title of this, at least in the first half, could be A List of Times That I Kept My Mouth Shut by Hillary Clinton. And is that not the cross that she had to bear as the first woman, major nominee? You very well could work that in. But I also think a big part of it is that she was running against Donald Trump, a candidate who is going to elicit or at least try to elicit an emotional response from you. I feel like one of the big points she makes in this book is that, you know, during the debate when he's looming behind her,

she had this feeling welling up in her of saying something about calling him a creep. Like, back off, you creep. Right. Whatever. But that she, you know, knew she had to keep her cool. To kind of round this out, then, it's an interesting question you're asking. That's very hard to answer because, you know, if you're asking if she learned that lesson, you know, maybe some, but A, she clearly kept herself, as she says, kind of straightjacketed in terms of her responses. But also one of the big things that she says she did wrong or that went wrong for her is that Donald Trump went out there and got at people's emotions and was able to do that. And she says, you know, I was not I was not the candidate to do that.

Well, she was criticized for raising her voice. Right. I mean, people even criticized her when she would like raise her voice in debates or on the stump. That's true. So she she talked about in our interview, she she talked about this disconnect that, you know, she she was not able to respond to that anger in a way that resonated with voters. There was so much anger and resentment in a significant part of the electorate that was just filled with grievance and anxiety. And I thought I could really help. I could make a difference. I could deal with what I believe will be very hard economic times ahead with automation, robotics, artificial intelligence. And I worked hard to come forward with ideas that could be implemented. But I don't think I adequately responded to that anger. One of my favorite analogies that she uses in the book is she's talking about her candidacy in terms of a couple in a relationship and how one member of the couple is the fixer. You know, the person who, you know, who hears you complain and instead of just sitting and empathizing and listening to

you, that says, all right, well, here's how to fix it and how that's maddening. Sometimes you're mad. You just want somebody to say, yeah, it sucks. And Hillary Clinton was like, I've got 65 plans for that. Right. Some of us are familiar with this. Lots of us are familiar with that. I mean, this is some of us are the fixers. I mean, this is this is one area where, first of all, where she gets at an idea and she explains it quite well and in a charming way. But where she also is, you know, you can take it with however many grains of salt you want, you know, whether that's true

or not. But that is how she sees one thing that went wrong on the campaign trail is that she was the fixer. People don't always like the fixer. What's so hard about that is that like she's obviously, you know, somebody who's deeply intellectual, highly educated. You can see that with her in the way that she even crafted policies as the Arkansas first lady. There was one anecdote where she back then was talking about pre-K in Arkansas and how she wanted to kind of help change pre-K in the state. And instead of going to find a model that she'd seen somewhere in Arkansas, she starts stumping around the state talking about this great model for pre-K in Israel that she'd been reading about. Oh, she still talked about that during the 2016 campaign. And I mean, it's that kind of thing, though, that just like goes over the heads of most Americans that makes it kind of tough for a politician who's on that level to really connect.

It's like, you know, we talk about, you know, we have a whole blog here called Code Switch, and the best presidents have been people who have been able to code switch. And it was much harder for her. And to make personal connections, because, and I was going to ask you this, Tam, I mean, it wasn't just the loss to Donald Trump, which we all know about and we're talking about. It's the loss also to Barack Obama. She was objectively more qualified than Barack Obama in 08 and far more qualified than Donald Trump, as we all know. And yet, as prepared as she was, I mean, Hillary Clinton occupies a particular place in American life. She wasn't able to pull off a win in either case. So she writes in

the book about how they were headed into the general election And she had three teams of people out there working to help her develop the theme that her campaign would have. And all three, she says, it's amazing, they independently came up with Stronger Together. When we got ready for the general election, I had three different, very smart groups work independently. And I asked them, so what should be the theme of our general election? And they each amazingly came up with the same slogan, stronger together. Now, can I just throw a flag on this, please? I'm flag on the field. Like, I mean, really, I've got to make some phone calls to former Clinton people. I don't know if you have already, Tam. But as soon as I heard that, I was like, really?

All independently came up with stronger together. But here's the more important point, which is not only was it maybe not as much of a just awesome like message sending theme that really told you what it was about, as Make America Great Again was for Donald Trump. But also she was headed into the general election trying to come up with a theme for her campaign. That also was reactive to Donald Trump. Do you know what I'm saying? Like he was such a larger than life figure. And she laments all the media attention that Trump got, the empty podiums and all that. But clearly the campaign had become about Donald Trump.

Well, yeah, I mean, you get the sense that, as she herself has said, she's not a natural campaigner. You know, she's good. She's good at the policy. She might even, you know, once in office be good at the politicking, the deal making, but, you know, not not great at the campaigning. And you get the sense that maybe maybe there is a I wonder if she thought that her smarts and the amount that she cares, that those two things would carry her much further than they ended up carrying her. And I think she what she sort of writes about in this book is that she thought that those plans of hers signaled how much she cared, right? Because she even had a funding mechanism figured out for some of these things. But and by the way, she was right about the Affordable Care Act in 2007 2008. The entire campaign, the primary campaign was consumed by Obama and Hillary Clinton, talking and arguing

with each other about the mandate and whether or not you needed to have the mandate to make the cost structures work. There was a 15-minute opening of a debate dedicated to whether the mandate had to be in. And her campaign and experts were all like, it has to be, it will be. And then it was. So then how does Hillary Clinton now deal with what must be the personal torture of waking up every morning and living in a Donald Trump presidency? Yeah. So throughout this book, she jabs him just like every every like third paragraph.

There's just like a little like jab twist, jab twist. To give some context here, by the way, you know, the Bernie stuff has gotten the ink, has gotten a lot of attention. There is not nearly as much as many swings of Bernie in this book as there are at Donald Trump. There are like two small swings at Bernie Sanders in this book. The number of times she just jabs at Donald Trump, it's a lot. And in our interview. Oh, here we go. Danielle's got the dog ears.

We're going to the purple tabs. I just have little, it's just the number of flags in here I have that are that have the words Trump. There are about 50 gold tabs. And we're joking, but I'm actually in awe of this. What else? Well, in our interview, there was a lot of reflection in our interview about things that she did wrong. But then I was like, OK, let's I'm going to dig a little deeper. If you if you could name one thing, your biggest regret, what would it be? Losing is my biggest regret.

And losing to someone who was not qualified and did not have the experience or the temperament to be president of the United States. That is my biggest regret. Which led me to then ask this question. Do you ever turn on the news and not think, what would I do in this situation? No, I do it every single time. And look, I was prepared to be president. I had prepared and worked at it. And I go a little bit batty when I hear him say, gee, this is a really hard job. Who knew health care was so complicated? I did. And so, no, I always am responding and reacting. Sometimes I yell at the TV. Are you making yourself crazy? No, not at all. I'm just thinking. I'm thinking hard and planning about what I can do to be, you know, an active citizen on behalf of, you know, the causes and

the values and Democratic Party candidates that I'm going to support. And yet, Domenico, there are a lot of people who just wish at this point Hillary Clinton would fade into the background and let the new crop of big names in the party such that they exist, you know, get attention. Like her to stay in the woods. Well, yeah. I mean, the thing is, a lot of Democrats are sympathetic, obviously, but they don't want to relive 2016. It was very painful for them. They don't want to relitigate what happened, but they want to look

toward the future. And they're not sure what the future is going to look like. I mean, we've seen a lot of anonymous quotes from Democrats saying not safe for podcast things about whether or not Hillary Clinton should be doing this or not. what they just went through. Because I think, like Danielle said, it is somewhat a historical artifact where this will forever go down in her voice as something that is thought out. Isn't it so perfect that for us to get a view inside Donald Trump's brain, we have to read 140 character or less tweets that are sent out at random times of the day. And for Hillary Clinton, we get a 469-page book. Right. With lots of quotes. So, Tim, what's your biggest takeaway having interviewed Hillary Clinton, but then also having covered the campaign

and had a front-row seat to everything that she writes about in this book? The thing that stood out to me most is the thing I haven't shut up about in this whole podcast, which is the like, yeah, she just didn't know how to convey that she was not the status quo because she probably was the status quo. She didn't know how to convey like, hey, white working class voters, I care about you. That's why I have these plans that you don't want to hear about. She just couldn't figure out how to break through. It's definitely easy to just go, what did she do wrong? Well, for a lot of people, she did stuff right. And those people are probably going to buy this book.

Right, absolutely. And some of those people were lined up overnight outside of a bookstore for a book signing. One other thing that I think was also very difficult for her is that if you are the first woman doing anything in politics where the public elects you, you are going to have everybody projecting all of their stuff onto you. And not just the first woman, the first black person, the first gay person, the first whatever.

If your group is underrepresented, you're going to have all those other women, for example, saying, is she like me? What kind of a woman is she? Because you have had so few options to pick from thus far. And so that's yet another hurdle, I believe, she had to go over and that the next woman just might have to go over. And there's one other thing I want to say about just candidates and them coming out and talking about what happened in an election afterward, because, you know, all these people who are saying, you know, that she should go away and it's unlike other years. A lot of other candidates, a couple of things, didn't write books about this

because they wanted to run again or wanted to have some kind of political future or had a job to go back to that was public facing. She doesn't. So I just want to step back and just remember that in the in the days and months after these elections, sometimes it does take a little bit for these candidates to get through. And they kind of create their own realities as to what they feel went on. And that's what I think this book is about. Can we just talk about the sexism thing? If that's OK. Yes. Because I asked her in our interview if she thought that maybe America just wasn't ready for a female president. And I was a little bit surprised by her answer. I think there's a significant percentage of Americans, many more in the Republican Party than in the Democratic Party, according to all of the data, that is just not ready. They just

cannot imagine it, and they are resistant to it. And I want in this book to make it very clear that what happened to me was not just about me. And that's why I talk about, you know, what the attacks on people like, you know, Senator Elizabeth Warren, or Senator Kamala Harris, or Senator Kirsten Gillibrand or on the Republican side, the kinds of things that Trump said to Carly Fiorina or what he says to, you know, women on TV. Look, if you think it's just about me, you don't have to deal with it because, OK, I lost, you know, have a nice time walking in the woods. But if you think it's endemic, as I believe it is, and that when a woman sticks her head up,

she gets hit from both the right and the left by men who, primarily men, who do not want to accept the reality of a woman being a leader, an executive. So part of the reason I wrote What Happened is because I want people to start thinking. I want this to be in book clubs and the topic of hot discussions over dinner tables because I marshaled evidence. And if somebody says, oh, I don't believe that, well, come with your evidence.

Yeah, so clearly she wants to be able to have a conversation put out there and put on the table to make sure that it doesn't go away, that it is debated and it's not just dismissed, as she said, as her just being a bad candidate. And yet, do you not think that Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand and even Carly Fiorina, for that matter, get to be more fully themselves in a way that they probably would not have been had it not been for Hillary Clinton. Are you talking about all those cracks in the glass ceiling? How many million more are there now?

I think it's 65.8. I don't remember that number. Danielle, what's the number? I don't know. Go. Okay, so that's a wrap for today, and we'll be back on Thursday. Our email address for your comments, questions, and timestamps, recorded for the beginning of the show, is nprpolitics at npr.org.

If you like the show, subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. That helps new listeners find us. Keep up with our coverage on npr.org, NPR Politics on Facebook, and, of course, your local public radio station. And on Up First every weekday morning. I'm Jeff Bennett. I cover the White House. I'm Tamara Keith. I also cover the White House. I'm Domenica Montanaro, political editor.

And I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. Thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.