For over a decade now, I’ve been deeply interested in the US elections. My attention towards them has only grown over time. I must admit that I’ve followed their polls, debates, news stories, speeches, etc. much more than I follow the Indian ones. The reasons for this are many – the spectacle which resembles reality television, the regular opinion polls which measure the mood towards the candidates irrespective of how far the elections are, the extremely oversimplifying of complex issues by the media and the candidates, and the eventual lure of power, dominance, and might over the world. But beyond all these, the real reason for my liking is the escape they offer from the politics of my own country, which, even at their best, is only depressing.

With the 2020 Presidential Elections around the corner, the excitement has only increased. So much so that I wanted to revisit and dwell deeper into the 2016 Elections. As someone who followed those elections with a very keen eye, most of what happened is still fresh in my memory. Nonetheless, I picked up a book that I’ve been meaning to read for over two years – ‘What Happened’ by Hillary Clinton.

The book was a long rant which has three noticeable threads. First, that Hillary Clinton is a woman. She has excessively explored the significance and momentousness of the US getting its first woman President which it never got. It seemed unnecessarily wishful as she repeatedly emphasized the importance of her win on the ‘little girls and boys’ of the country. It’s one thing to surmise much of this, but it is quite something else to applaud oneself for their own (almost) breaking of the glass ceiling when it actually failed.

Second, Hillary went on a rampage to justify her political stands and calls she has taken over the decades. She claimed to be the most consistent person while dissing both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump for their shifty viewpoints. This, she does, with surprising ignorance to her own inconsistency that she herself narrates – be it on guns, the 1995 law which allowed mass incarceration of Blacks, or her stand on the same-sex marriage. Because when Bernie moves around even negligibly, he is inconsistent. But when Hillary drastically changes her opinions, she is only evolving to lead the progressive movement.

Third, the book disses everyone she thinks has played a role in her defeat. It starts with Trump himself being divisive and voicing the anger, then moves on with how unfairly she has been treated because she is a woman, blames Putin for all the interference and personal vendetta that he had against her, calls out James Comey for the untimely letter to the eight congressmen written eleven days before the election to say that Hillary’s emails are pertinent and call for further investigation, her unfair media coverage which did not show her policy stands, and so on!

And finally, she claims that all the observers are wrong when they say that she took some Mid-West States for granted. This, despite admitting that she hasn’t visited Wisconsin once and visited Michigan only five times. On the other hand, she was busy touring Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia – States which, even in the most optimistic scenarios of 2016, would end up red.

Unfortunately, the book said nothing new. Anyone who watched the elections knows how miniscule the margin of victory was for Trump. Only if about eighty thousand people in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan had voted the other way, she’d have been the President. And given the political experience and the hard work that Clinton put in, she deserved a win. But it was not meant to be. It surely does hurt and I can sense that pain in the book. Even if half of her allegations are true, she has been undoubtedly treated unfairly. And as the fate would have it, she was at the wrong place at a very wrong time. It is true that given her experience, she’d have won the elections in 2008 or 2012, or even if she had been a man. If nothing, she should’ve been young enough to run in 2020 and she’d have seen the light of the day.

Although, I have no qualms about her not winning the election, her personal story in her own words do cause some discomfort. Hopefully, there will soon be a woman who is more self-made, consistent, and deserving to make it to the White House. Even though I’m not excited about the idea of Kamala Harris being that woman, but if I had to bet, it’ll be her in 2024 (or sooner).