The decline of serious reporting on policy has been going on for a while, but it got much worse in 2016. In 2008, the major networks’ nightly newscasts spent a total of 220 minutes on policy. In 2012, it was 114 minutes. In 2016, it was just 32 minutes. (That stat is from two weeks before the election, but it didn’t change much in the final stretch.) By contrast, 100 minutes were spent covering my emails. In other words, the political press was telling voters that my emails were three times more important than all the other issues combined.
Maybe this bothers me so much because I’m an unapologetic policy wonk. It’s true that I sweat the details, whether it’s the precise level of lead in the drinking water in Flint, the number of mental health facilities in Iowa, the cost of specific prescription drugs, or how exactly the nuclear triad works. Those aren’t just details if it’s your kid or your aging parent whose life depends on it—or, when it comes to nukes, if all life on earth depends on it. Those details ought to be important to anyone seeking to lead our country.
I’ve always thought about policy in a very practical way. It’s how we solve problems and make life better for people. I try to learn as much as I can about the challenges people face and then work with the smartest experts I can find to come up with solutions that are achievable, affordable, and will actually make a measurable difference. For the campaign, I hired a policy team with deep experience in government and relied on an extensive network of outside advisors drawn from academia, think tanks, and the private sector. The crew in Brooklyn proudly hung a sign above their desks that read “Wonks for the Win.” They produced reams of position papers. Many included budget scores, substantive footnotes—the whole nine yards. It felt like a White House-in-waiting, which is exactly what I had in mind. I wanted to be able to hit the ground running, ready to sign executive orders and work with Congress to pass as much legislation as possible in my first hundred days in office. I also wanted voters to know exactly what they could expect from me as President, how it would affect their lives, and be able to hold me accountable for delivering.
Over the course of the 2016 race, I also came to better appreciate other ways of thinking about policy: as a window to a candidate’s character and a tool for mobilization.
Joe Biden likes to say, “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” This is something I’ve always believed as welclass="underline" that the policies you propose say a lot about your principles and priorities. You can evaluate a candidate’s childcare plan based on how much it will cost, who it will help, and whether it has a chance of passing Congress. But you can also see it as a window into the candidate’s heart: this is a person who cares about children and believes society has a responsibility to help care for the most vulnerable among us. The piece that perhaps I undervalued is that, from this perspective, the details of the plan may matter less than how it’s framed and sold to the public—in other words, the optics of it. I cared about the optics, but not nearly as much as I cared about the merits of the plans themselves, and it showed.
Policy can also be a source of inspiration. I don’t know how many Trump supporters really believed that he’d build a giant wall across the entire southern border and get Mexico to pay for it. But hearing him say it got them excited. You don’t have to like the idea to see that it gave them something to talk to their friends about, tweet, and post on Facebook. It was a rallying call more than it was a credible policy proposal, but that didn’t make it any less powerful—especially if voters weren’t hearing me talk about immigration or any of their economic concerns because of overwhelming coverage of emails.
These different ways of thinking about policy helped shape both the primaries and the general election in 2016.
From the beginning, I expected a strong primary challenge from the left. It happens almost every time, and it was clear this time that there was a lot of populist energy waiting to find a champion. Anger at the financial industry had been building for years. The Occupy Wall Street movement had helped shine a light on the problem of income inequality. And after years of biting their tongues about the Obama administration’s compromises, left-wing Democrats were ready to let loose.
Senator Elizabeth Warren was the name most often mentioned as a potential candidate, but I wasn’t convinced she was going to jump in. After all, she had joined all the other Democratic women Senators in signing a letter urging me to run. I’ve long admired Elizabeth’s passion and tenacity, especially her farsighted efforts to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2011, which has now returned nearly $12 billion to more than twenty-nine million Americans ripped off by predatory lenders, credit card companies, and other corporate miscreants. So before I announced my candidacy, I invited her to my house in Washington to take her temperature and see if we might be able to work together. I think we both were a little wary, but we approached each other with good faith, good intentions, and open minds. I came away convinced that if Elizabeth believed her views and priorities would be included and respected in my campaign, she might become my champion rather than my challenger. In our meeting, we talked about some of the issues she cares about most, including student debt and financial reform. Knowing that Elizabeth believes “personnel is policy,” I asked her to recommend experts whose advice I could seek. She gave me a list, and my team methodically worked through it, making sure our agenda was informed by the perspectives of people she trusted. Two friends we share in common—the political consultant Mandy Grunwald, who also worked for Elizabeth, and the former financial regulator Gary Gensler, who served as my campaign’s chief financial officer—helped us stay connected. Later, Elizabeth was on my list of potential choices for Vice President.
Elizabeth never joined the race, but Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialist Senator from Vermont, did. Even though I understood that a lot of Democratic primary voters were looking for a left-wing alternative, I admit I didn’t expect Bernie to catch on as much as he did. Nothing in my experience in American politics suggested that a Socialist from Vermont could mount a credible campaign for the White House. But Bernie proved to be a disciplined and effective politician. He tapped into powerful emotional currents in the electorate. And he was aided by the fact that the primaries began with the white, liberal bastions of Iowa and New Hampshire, his neighboring state. When a Des Moines Register poll in January 2016 found that 43 percent of likely Iowa Democratic caucusgoers identified as Socialists, I knew there could be trouble ahead.