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The trouble is that when we get around to solutions, it always seems to come down to Prozac. Or Zoloft. Or Paxil. Deep clinical depression is a disease, one that not only can, but probably should, be treated with drugs. But a low-grade terminal anomie, a sense of alienation or disgust and detachment, the collective horror at a world that seems to have gone so very wrong, is not a job for antidepressants. The trouble is, the big-picture problems that have so many people down are more or less insoluble: As long as people can get divorced they will get divorced; America=s shrinking economy is not reversible; there is no cure for AIDS. So it starts to seem fairly reasonable to anesthetize ourselves in the best possible way. I would like so much to say that Prozac is preventing many people who are not clinically depressed from finding real antidotes to what Hillary Clinton refers to as 'a sleeping sickness of the soul,' but what exactly would those solutions be? I mean, universal health care coverage and a national service draft would be nice, but neither one is going to save us from ourselves. Just as our parents quieted us when we were noisy by putting us in front of the television set, maybe we're now learning to quiet our own adult noise with Prozac.
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Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)
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Back at home, I caught up on TV shows Bill had been saving. We raced through old episodes of The Good Wife, Madam Secretary, Blue Bloods, and NCIS: Los Angeles, which Bill insists is the best of the franchise. I also finally saw the last season of Downton Abbey.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
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It is the simplest phrase you can imagine,” Favreau said, “three monosyllabic words that people say to each other every day.” But the speech etched itself in rhetorical lore. It inspired music videos and memes and the full range of reactions that any blockbuster receives online today, from praise to out-of-context humor to arch mockery. Obama’s “Yes, we can” refrain is an example of a rhetorical device known as epistrophe, or the repetition of words at the end of a sentence. It’s one of many famous rhetorical types, most with Greek names, based on some form of repetition. There is anaphora, which is repetition at the beginning of a sentence (Winston Churchill: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields”). There is tricolon, which is repetition in short triplicate (Abraham Lincoln: “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people”). There is epizeuxis, which is the same word repeated over and over (Nancy Pelosi: “Just remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs”). There is diacope, which is the repetition of a word or phrase with a brief interruption (Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) or, most simply, an A-B-A structure (Sarah Palin: “Drill baby drill!”). There is antithesis, which is repetition of clause structures to juxtapose contrasting ideas (Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”). There is parallelism, which is repetition of sentence structure (the paragraph you just read). Finally, there is the king of all modern speech-making tricks, antimetabole, which is rhetorical inversion: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” There are several reasons why antimetabole is so popular. First, it’s just complex enough to disguise the fact that it’s formulaic. Second, it’s useful for highlighting an argument by drawing a clear contrast. Third, it’s quite poppy, in the Swedish songwriting sense, building a hook around two elements—A and B—and inverting them to give listeners immediate gratification and meaning. The classic structure of antimetabole is AB;BA, which is easy to remember since it spells out the name of a certain Swedish band.18 Famous ABBA examples in politics include: “Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men.” —Benjamin Disraeli “East and West do not mistrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we mistrust each other.” —Ronald Reagan “The world faces a very different Russia than it did in 1991. Like all countries, Russia also faces a very different world.” —Bill Clinton “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” —George W. Bush “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” —Hillary Clinton In particular, President John F. Kennedy made ABBA famous (and ABBA made John F. Kennedy famous). “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind,” he said, and “Each increase of tension has produced an increase of arms; each increase of arms has produced an increase of tension,” and most famously, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Antimetabole is like the C–G–Am–F chord progression in Western pop music: When you learn it somewhere, you hear it everywhere.19 Difficult and even controversial ideas are transformed, through ABBA, into something like musical hooks.
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Derek Thompson (Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular)
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Let us admit that some government programs and personnel are efficient and effective, and others are not. Let us acknowledge that when it comes to the treatment of children, some individuals are evil, neglectful, or incompetent, but others are trying to do the best they can against daunting odds and deserve not our contempt but the help only we—through our government—can provide. Let us stop stereotyping government and individuals as absolute villains or absolute saviors, and recognize that each must be part of the solution. Let us use government, as we have in the past, to further the common good.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us)
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From Hillary Clinton, I have learned all kinds of things. How to be confident, brave, unfailingly empathetic, future-focused, tough, and gracious. She and I have had countless adventures over the past twenty-five years and who knows what else lies in the future, but I am still certain about one thing. Hillary Clinton would have been an exceptional President of the United States. Maybe one of the best presidents. I say that with even more conviction and resolve today than when I believed it as a starry-eyed young woman.
The overarching quest of her public life has always been how to help every man, woman, and child reach their full potential. That purpose drove every policy rollout, every bill in the Senate, every speech she delivered, every town and country she visited, every book she wrote. Her focus was always how to give each child the opportunity to grow and flourish, every parent the tools to raise healthy, educated children, every person the right to live in dignity, every worker the protections and rights to succeed and thrive. As president, she would have reached across the aisle and forced divergent opinions to the table to help all Americans. She would have served her country, not herself. Maybe it won't happen in her lifetime or mine, but I'm confident that history will remember her as one of the American Greats.
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Huma Abedin (Both/And: A Memoir)
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OBAMA WENT THROUGH STAGES. That first day, I was in multiple meetings where he tried to lift everyone’s spirits. That evening, he interrupted the senior staff meeting in Denis McDonough’s office and gave a version of the speech that I’d now heard three times as we all sat there at the table. He was the only one standing. It was both admirable and heartbreaking watching him take everything in stride, working—still—to lift people’s spirits. When he was done, I spoke first. “It says a lot about you,” I said, “that you’ve spent the whole day trying to buck the rest of us up.” People applauded. Obama looked down. On the Thursday after the election, he had a long, amiable meeting with Trump. It left him somewhat stupefied. Trump had repeatedly steered the conversation back to the size of his rallies, noting that he and Obama could draw big crowds but Hillary couldn’t. He’d expressed openness to Obama’s arguments about healthcare, the Iran deal, immigration. He’d asked for recommendations for staff. He’d praised Obama publicly when the press was there. Afterward, Obama called a few of us up to the Oval Office to recap. “I’m trying to place him,” he said, “in American history.” He told us Trump had been perfectly cordial, but he’d almost taken pride in not being attached to a firm position on anything. “He peddles bullshit. That character has always been a part of the American story,” I said. “You can see it right back to some of the characters in Huckleberry Finn.” Obama chuckled. “Maybe that’s the best we can hope for.” In breaks between meetings in the coming days, he expressed disbelief that the election had been lost. With unemployment at 5 percent. With the economy humming. With the Affordable Care Act working. With graduation rates up. With most of our troops back home. But then again, maybe that’s why Trump could win. People would never have voted for him in a crisis. He kept talking it out, trying on different theories. He chalked it up to multiple car crashes at once. There was the letter from Comey shortly before the election, reopening the investigation into Clinton’s email server. There was the steady release of Podesta emails from Wikileaks through October. There was a rabid right-wing propaganda machine and a mainstream press that gorged on the story of Hillary’s emails, feeding Trump’s narrative of corruption.
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Ben Rhodes (The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House)
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He ran long at the White House, and arrived late to his next meeting with Hillary Clinton, Jake Sullivan and Frank Ruggiero—their first major strategy session on Taliban talks after the secret meeting with A-Rod. She was waiting in her outer office, a spacious room paneled in white and gilt wood, with tasseled blue and pink curtains and an array of colorfully upholstered chairs and couches. In my time reporting to her later, I only ever saw Clinton take the couch, with guests of honor in the large chair kitty-corner to her. She’d left it open for him that day. “He came rushing in. . . . ” Clinton later said. “And, you know, he was saying ‘oh I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’ ” He sat down heavily and shrugged off his coat, rattling off a litany of his latest meetings, including his stop-in at the White House. “That was typical Richard. It was, like, ‘I’m doing a million things and I’m trying to keep all the balls in the air,’ ” she remembered. As he was talking, a “scarlet red” flush went up his face, according to Clinton. He pressed his hands over his eyes, his chest heaving. “Richard, what’s the matter?” Clinton asked. “Something horrible is happening,” he said. A few minutes later, Holbrooke was in an ambulance, strapped to a gurney, headed to nearby George Washington University Hospital, where Clinton had told her own internist to prepare the emergency room. In his typically brash style, he’d demanded that the ambulance take him to the more distant Sibley Memorial Hospital. Clinton overruled him. One of our deputies on the SRAP team, Dan Feldman, rode with him and held his hand. Feldman didn’t have his BlackBerry, so he scrawled notes on a State Department expense form for a dinner at Meiwah Restaurant as Holbrooke dictated messages and a doctor assessed him. The notes are a nonlinear stream of Holbrooke’s indomitable personality, slashed through with medical realities. “Call Eric in Axelrod’s office,” the first read. Nearby: “aortic dissection—type A . . . operation risk @ > 50 percent”—that would be chance of death. A series of messages for people in his life, again interrupted by his deteriorating condition: “S”—Secretary Clinton—“why always together for medical crises?” (The year before, he’d been with Clinton when she fell to the concrete floor of the State Department garage, fracturing her elbow.) “Kids—how much love them + stepkids” . . . “best staff ever” . . . “don’t let him die here” . . . “vascular surgery” . . . “no flow, no feeling legs” . . . “clot” . . . and then, again: “don’t let him die here want to die at home w/ his fam.” The seriousness of the situation fully dawning on him, Holbrooke turned to job succession: “Tell Frank”—Ruggiero—“he’s acting.” And finally: “I love so many people . . . I have a lot left to do . . . my career in public service is over.” Holbrooke cracked wise until they put him under for surgery. “Get me anything you need,” he demanded. “A pig’s heart. Dan’s heart.
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Ronan Farrow (War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence)
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...the best missile defence system of all would be a just and lasting peace.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (Hard Choices)
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The outgoing President left a letter for Bill in the Oval Office that is one of the most decent and patriotic things I’ve ever read. “Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you,” he wrote. We did our best to show the same graciousness to George W. and Laura eight years later.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
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We Americans may differ, bicker, stumble, and fall; but we are at our best when we pick each other up, when we have each other’s back. Like any family, our American family is strongest when we cherish what we have in common and fight back against those who would drive us apart.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
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So that wasn’t much help. I was torn. I wanted to be judged on what I did, not on what I represented or what people projected onto me. But I understood how much this breakthrough would mean to the country, especially to girls and boys who would see that there are no limits on what women can achieve. I wanted to honor that significance. I just didn’t know the best way to do it. I carried all that uncertainty with me back from California, all the way to David Muir’s interview room in the Brooklyn Navy Yard on Tuesday night. Results were starting to come in. I won the New Jersey primary. Bernie won the North Dakota caucus. The big prize, California, was still out there, but all signs pointed to another victory. Bill and I had worked hard on my speech, but I still felt unsettled. Maybe it was about not being ready to accept “yes” for an answer. I had worked so hard to get to this moment, and now that it had arrived, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself. Then Muir walked me over to the window, and I looked out at that crowd—at thousands of people who’d worked their hearts out, resisted the negativity of a divisive primary and relentlessly harsh press coverage, and poured their dreams into my campaign. We’d had big crowds before, but this felt different. It was something more than the enthusiasm I saw on the trail. It was a pulsing energy, an outpouring of love and hope and joy. For a moment, I was overwhelmed—and then calm. This was right. I was ready. After the interview, I went downstairs to where my husband was sitting with the speechwriters going over final tweaks to the draft. I read it over one more time and felt good. Just as they were racing off to load the speech into the teleprompter, I said I had one more thing to add: “I’m going to talk about Seneca Falls. Just put a placeholder in brackets and I’ll take care of it.” I took a deep breath. I didn’t want the emotion of the moment to get to me in the middle of my speech. I said a little prayer and then headed for the stage. At the last moment, Huma grabbed my arm and
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
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There are times when all I want to do is scream into a pillow. But slowly, on a personal level, it has gotten better—or at least less terrible. I did quite a bit of thinking and writing, some praying, some stewing, and, in time, a good deal of laughing. I went on a lot of long walks in the woods with my husband and our dogs, Tally and Maisie, who took all this much better than we did. I surrounded myself with friends and caught up on some of the shows that people have been telling me about for years, as well as a lot of HGTV. Best of all, I spent time with my wonderful grandchildren, making up for all the bedtime stories and songs in the bathtub I missed during my long months on the campaign trail. I believe this is what some call “self-care.” It turns out, it’s pretty great.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
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Was i Doomed from the Start?
Some pundits have also said my campaign was doomed from the start, either because of my weaknesses as a candidate or because America was caught up in a historic wave of angry, tribal populism sweeping the world. Maybe. But don't forget I wan the popular vote by nearly three million, roughly the same margin by which George W. Bush defeated John Kerry in 2004. It's hard to see how that happens if I'm hopeless out of step with the American people.
Still as I've discussed throughout this book, I do think it's fair to say there was a fundamental mismatch between how i approach politics and what a lot of the country wanted to hear in 2016. I've learned that even the best plans and proposals can land on deaf ears when people are disillusioned by a broken political system and disgusted with politicians. When people are angry and looking for someone to blame, they don't want to hear your ten-point plan to create jobs and raise wages. They want you to be angry, too.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton
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On the Saturday after the election, I turned on Saturday Night Live and watched Kate McKinnon open the show with her impression of me one more time. She sat at a grand piano and played “Hallelujah,” the hauntingly beautiful song by Leonard Cohen, who had died a few days before. As she sang, it seemed like she was fighting back tears. Listening, so was I. I did my best, it wasn’t much, I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you And even though it all went wrong I’ll stand before the lord of song With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah. At the end, Kate-as-Hillary turned to the camera and said, “I’m not giving up and neither should you.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
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but rather as the best candidate whose experience as a woman in a male-dominated culture made her sharper, tougher, and more competent.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
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The ties between evangelicals and Republicanism is so strong today that, in 2016, even an irreligious Republican, Donald Trump, could best a devout Methodist, Hillary Clinton, by fifteen points among Protestants as a whole. That was because whites who called themselves either “evangelical” or “born again” cast 80 percent of their ballots for Trump and only 16 percent for Clinton.
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Marc Hetherington (Prius Or Pickup?: How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America's Great Divide)
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12. WHY ARE MY ANKLES SWOLLEN? Salt intake, circulation issues, hot weather, your name is Hillary Clinton, you just got off a plane that crossed over Texas, or someone put a curse on you. Who knows. All I know is that if I’m traveling anywhere, by the time I land, my ankles will look like a python who snuck out of its cage at a pet store and paid a visit to a colony of rats. Bring water pills with you, and wear compression socks (they look just like regular socks). For most people, swollen ankles are seasonal, really only affecting them at a time of the year when people will actually see their ankles. The best news is that you probably still have your Docs, and this is indeed the very best time to wear them.
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Laurie Notaro (Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem)
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It clearly wasn’t the best choice. I should’ve used two emails—one personal, one for work,” she said.
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Jonathan Allen (Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign)
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Older women especially saw Hillary Clinton as their last and best chance to see a woman in the White House. And not just any woman:7 as one said, “This isn’t just about biology. We don’t want a Margaret Thatcher, who cut off milk for schoolchildren.” They
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Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
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Forced by the Starr investigation, the president was to give testimony on the Paula Jones case any day now. Somehow Matt Drudge and his website received a leak. In response the president had signed a subpoenaed affidavit, legally sworn testimony denying any sexual relations with Paula Jones, the low-level Arkansas state employee who had accused him of sexual harassment, and more so, any relationship with Monica Lewinsky. He said they didn’t have any contact with each other, hadn’t even been alone in the same room together. He swore to it and said others could corroborate. Monica Lewinsky signed another affidavit. Ken Starr had been following the Clintons like a bloodhound. But at each turn of each scandal (Whitewater, Vince Foster’s suicide, Travelgate, Filegate, the affairs, the bribes, Troopergate, and more) it all came down to deny-deny-deny and the Clintons’ word against everyone else’s. Only this time, Clinton arrogantly denied his affair with Monica on a legal affidavit, sworn testimony. The shit was hitting the fan. Ken Starr now needed to prove Clinton was a liar—a perjurer. He needed evidence. Since they subpoenaed our logbook, I knew I was on Starr’s list. I couldn’t listen. I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t drive anymore. My partner asked me what was wrong. I can remember the feeling, my heart racing, my mind whirling, racked with pain, doubt, remorse, and regret. Oh my God, Starr, the Clintons, the Service, the FBI, the Justice Department, my friends, my family—no, not my friends and family—but everyone is going to implicate me, my integrity, my professionalism, my ethics, my foundation, my character. What about Genny and my unborn child? I didn’t sign up for this! We never signed up for this! Why did the Clintons have to do this to us? Haven’t I treated them well, done my best? They just couldn’t do the right thing! They couldn’t stop themselves!
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Gary J. Byrne (Crisis of Character: A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience with Hillary, Bill, and How They Operate)
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One of Paul Manafort’s best decisions was hiring Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio to determine how to beat Hillary Clinton. In the end, it was the pugnacious and bulldog-like Fabrizio, who insisted that the Trump campaign had to expand the map into Wisconsin and Michigan, while doubling down on Pennsylvania. The campaign shifted digital paid advertising resources to the states but it was Trump’s personal barnstorming in all three states that made all the difference. Fabrizio insisted Trump could win only through this route. He was right. Trump
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Roger Stone (The Making of the President 2016: How Donald Trump Orchestrated a Revolution)
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Oaths such as “the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God,” it was clear to me, meant as much as “shall not be infringed,” or “swear to uphold and defend,” among others. For men of character, life is very simple. It’s best to keep it that way. But clearly for the guy I was watching on television, life was just a sharp answer to woo a voter. Bill Clinton thought he had all the answers. But he never even understood the real questions in life. I watched the rest of his proceedings in pieces, not being able to stand the deposition for more than a few minutes at a time. It was an embarrassment to me and the nation.
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Gary J. Byrne (Crisis of Character: A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience with Hillary, Bill, and How They Operate)
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Our best information is that she set it up as a matter of convenience. —FBI Director Jim Comey, in congressional testimony, July 7, 2016 Yes, it was supposed to be convenient. Some doubted that explanation. But that’s what the FBI concluded after months of investigation. And it’s the truth.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
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picked up my ballpoint pen and, playing off Jim’s language, wrote, “We Americans may differ, bicker, stumble, and fall; but we are at our best when we pick each other up, when we have each other’s back. Like any family, our American family is strongest when we cherish what we have in common and fight back against those who would drive us apart.” A few hours later, I was standing at the podium in the blinding June sun, looking out at the excited faces of cheering supporters. I saw little kids perched on their parents’ shoulders. Friends smiled up at me from the front row. Bill, Chelsea, and Marc were glowing with pride and love. The stage was shaped like our campaign logo: a big blue H with a red arrow cutting across the middle. All around it, a sea of people clapped, hollered, and waved American flags.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
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If the inauguration on Friday was the worst of times, Saturday turned out to be the best of times.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
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Older women especially saw Hillary Clinton as their last and best chance to see a woman in the White House. And not just any woman:7 as one said, “This isn’t just about biology. We don’t want a Margaret Thatcher, who cut off milk for schoolchildren.” They wanted Hillary Clinton because she supported the majority interests of women. On
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Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
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It’s about when to stop,” said Irfan. “Stop what?” “Stop looking for a house, a spouse, a job. A secretary,” he said. “Knowing when you’ve found the right one. The best one. Or do you always question if a better one is out there? As long as you’re doing that, no progress is possible. A decision must be made, even if it’s imperfect.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (State of Terror)
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Hillary had always seen Biden as a serious threat to run. From the moment Barack Obama won reelection in 2012, the news media focused on her, and Biden was, at best, an afterthought. This disinterest allowed him to operate under the radar and without the pressure of being a candidate-in-waiting. But Hillary knew that Biden still harbored presidential ambitions. After all, he had run twice before and certainly saw himself as the person with the most logical claim to Obama’s mantle.
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Jonathan Allen (Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign)
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Older women especially saw Hillary Clinton as their last and best chance to see a woman in the White House. And not just any woman:7 as one said, “This isn’t just about biology. We don’t want a Margaret Thatcher, who cut off milk for schoolchildren.
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Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
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On Facebook, the Russians posted under the name Blacktivist, which they had used to elbow their way into a series of rallies in Buffalo, New York, that were demanding answers about the mysterious jailhouse death of a young African American woman, India Cummings. After muscling their way into the protests, the Russians began inflating their stature and profile using an internet bot farm that gave Blacktivist an even larger following than Black Lives Matter had. With their bona fides secured, the undercover Russians then began posting about the upcoming 2016 election. “They would say things like: ‘What have the Democrats done for you the last four years, the last 60 years’ ” and then, when the unspoken reply was “nothing,” the Russians in their best cyber-militancy mode would answer: “ ‘Show them your power by not showing up to vote.’ ” The message spread like a virulent toxin.6 One election expert observed that “Russians understood how important minority voters were to Hillary Clinton’s chances in this election. They were able to read the situation and say, ‘If we demobilize this community, it could have enough of an impact.
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Carol Anderson (One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy)
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It’s naive not to believe that powerful individuals within the major power centers of society—Hollywood, media, government, academia, religion, and science—are committed to brainwashing the masses into believing lies about reality, human nature, and behavior. They are already planning to persuade humanity to go along—willingly or unwillingly—with the elite’s socialist-utopian vision of the future. Why would they do that? The secretive ruling elite want to turn our world into a global socialist or communist state, which will enable them to acquire dictatorial power and amass even greater wealth. Their globalist game plan has nothing to do with what is fair or best for everyone. It is strictly about what is better for them, because they literally view themselves as the rulers of the planet and see us as “useless eaters” who exist to serve them. Many will find this difficult to accept, because they have been brainwashed to believe the globalist elite want to share their wealth and a create a better world for all mankind. Unfortunately, that is a total lie and not even on the menu.14 Do you really think when a major politician such as Hillary Clinton described a large segment of American voters as “deplorables” that her remark was just a slip of the tongue? This is what Clinton said at a LGBT fund-raiser before introducing actress Barbra Streisand: “To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.”15 That’s how the globalist elite view much of the world. They speak of the need to “cull the herd”—a truly chilling turn
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Paul McGuire (Trumpocalypse: The End-Times President, a Battle Against the Globalist Elite, and the Countdown to Armageddon (Babylon Code))
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The data team would collect as much information as possible about potential voters, including age, race, ethnicity, voting history, and magazine subscriptions, among other things. Each person was given a score, ranging from zero to one hundred, in each of three categories: probability of voting, probability of voting for Hillary, and probability, if they were undecided, that they could be persuaded to vote for her. These scores determined which voters got contacted by the campaign and in which manner—a television spot, an ad on their favorite website, a knock on their door, or a piece of direct mail. “It’s a grayscale,” said a campaign aide familiar with the operation. “You start with the people who are the best targets and go down until you run out of resources.
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Jonathan Allen (Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign)
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14. He’s denied climate change. Then denied that he denied it. Here’s Trump calling global warming a conspiracy created by the Chinese: The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.
@realDonaldTrump – 11:15 AM – 6 Nov 2012 More tweets of him calling global warming a hoax… NBC News just called it the great freeze – coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?
@realDonaldTrump – 3:48 PM – 25 Jan 2014 This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice
@realDonaldTrump – 4:39 PM – 1 Jan 2014 Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee – I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!
@realDonaldTrump – 7:13 AM – 6 Dec 2013 Then, during a presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump denied that he said any of this. Here’s the video. Clinton says, “Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax, perpetrated by the Chinese. I think it’s real.” Trump interrupts to say, “I do not say that. I do not say that.” Actually, Donald, you’ve said nothing else. Trump has also said, dozens of times in tweets like this, that global warming sounds like a great idea: It’s freezing and snowing in New York–we need global warming!
@realDonaldTrump – 11:24 AM – 7 Nov 2012 Here he is hating wind turbines: It’s Friday. How many bald eagles did wind turbines kill today? They are an environmental & aesthetic disaster.
@realDonaldTrump – 12:55 PM – 24 Aug 2012 Trump fought against a “really ugly” offshore wind farm in Scotland because it would mar the view from his Scottish golf resort. My new club on the Atlantic Ocean in Ireland will soon be one of the best in the World – and no-one will be looking into ugly wind turbines!
@realDonaldTrump – 5:24 AM – 14 Feb 2014
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Guy Fawkes (101 Indisputable Facts Proving Donald Trump Is An Idiot: A brief background of the most spectacularly unqualified person to ever occupy the White House.)
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The second passenger, Donald Trump, runs screaming, "I'm the smartest man in the world & the next President of America.” He grabbed the second parachute and jumped. The third passenger, Hillary Clinton, says to Bernie Sanders, "take the last parachute." Bernie says, "It's ok Hillary, there is a parachute for both of us. The world's smartest man just took my backpack.
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Josh N. Hugh (Donald Trump Jokes: The Best 100+ Hilarious Jokes About Donald Trump)
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The 4,765 Democratic delegates were split into two types: a set of 700-plus party leaders, called “superdelegates,” who could vote for whomever they chose, and more than 4,000 “pledged” delegates who were bound to vote for a candidate based on the outcome in their home district or state. Each candidate would win a percentage of the statewide pledged delegates based on the percentage of the vote he or she won, and each would take a share of the pledged delegates available in each of the state’s congressional districts based on his or her percentage of the vote there. Importantly, states with more population have a larger number of available delegates, and the delegates aren’t spread evenly throughout a state’s congressional districts. The total number of delegates available in a district is pegged to the district’s performance for Democratic candidates in previous elections. It’s all very complicated, but it boils down to this: A candidate who does best in the most Democratic parts of a state can rack up a lot of delegates fast. In many states, the delegate-rich districts are majority-minority. Hillary and her delegate-crunching team knew that running up the score among black and Hispanic voters would net her an outsize share of the delegates in populous states with more delegates available. Bernie had won New Hampshire by 22 points, but that netted him just a 15-to-9 delegate haul. Hillary could more than erase that with a good showing in a single black-majority district in Mississippi.
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Jonathan Allen (Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign)
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Women are the largest untapped reservoir of talent in the world
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Hillary Rodham Clinton
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On New Year’s Day, Hillary and Bill were out on a boat, bobbing along on the blue-green sea, and decided to take a
swim. They leapt into the water, swam up to the beach, and then Hillary posed the question directly to the person who knew her best—and who understood as well as anyone alive what running for president entailed.
What should I do, Bill? she asked. Should I do this or not?
You have to ask yourself one question, he replied. Of all the people running, would I be the best president? If you can answer yes, then you need to run. If you’re not sure, then you need to think more about it, and if the answer is no, don’t do it. That’s all I can tell you, Bill said.
Not long after, Solis Doyle’s phone rang back in Washington.
“Bill said that if I really feel like I can do this, and do a good job
and be the best one, then I should do it,” Hillary said. “And I do
believe that.”
Solis Doyle exhaled and smiled.
“Okay! Let’s go, then!” Patti said, and they were finally off and running.
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John Heilemann (Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime)
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On New Year’s Day, Hillary and Bill were out on a boat, bobbing along on the blue-green sea, and decided to take a swim. They leapt into the water, swam up to the beach, and then Hillary posed the question directly to the person who knew her best—and who understood as well as anyone alive what running for president entailed.
What should I do, Bill? she asked. Should I do this or not?
You have to ask yourself one question, he replied. Of all the people running, would I be the best president? If you can answer yes, then you need to run. If you’re not sure, then you need to think more about it, and if the answer is no, don’t do it. That’s all I can tell you, Bill said.
Not long after, Solis Doyle’s phone rang back in Washington.
“Bill said that if I really feel like I can do this, and do a good job
and be the best one, then I should do it,” Hillary said. “And I do
believe that.”
Solis Doyle exhaled and smiled.
“Okay! Let’s go, then!” Patti said, and they were finally off and running.
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John Heilemann (Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime)