What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton

Author:Hillary Rodham Clinton [Clinton, Hillary Rodham]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2017-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

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The next day, I sneaked into Philadelphia so I could make a surprise appearance with President Obama after his speech. He was masterful, of course, and incredibly generous. He talked about what it takes to sit behind the desk in the Oval Office and make life-and-death decisions that affect the whole world, and how I’d been there with him, helping make those hard choices. He looked up at where Bill was sitting and said with a smile, “There has never been a man or a woman—not me, not Bill, nobody—more qualified.” Bill loved it and jumped to his feet and applauded. When Barack finished, I popped out from backstage and gave him a big hug.

Then, on the final day of the convention, it was time for me to give the most important speech of my life. In some ways, this was easier than that night at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I was ready to be the party’s standard-bearer in the battle to come, and I was confident in the vision I wanted to share with the country. I would argue that Americans are always “stronger together,” and that if we worked together, we could rise together. We could live up to our country’s motto, e pluribus unum: “out of many, we are one.” Trump, by contrast, would tear us apart.

We had settled on Stronger Together as our theme for the general election after a lot of thought and discussion. Remarkably, three separate brainstorming processes all led to the same answer. My team in Brooklyn had started with three basic contrasts we wanted to draw with Trump. He was risky and unqualified, but I was steady and ready to deliver results on Day One. He was a fraud who was in it only for himself, but I was in it for children and families and would make our economy work for everyone, not just those at the top. He was divisive, while I would work to bring the country together. The challenge was to find a way to marry all three together in a memorable slogan that reflected my values and record. Stronger Together did that better than anything else we could think of.

While the team in Brooklyn worked on this, I asked Roy Spence to spend some time thinking outside the box about campaign themes and messages. Roy is an old friend from the McGovern campaign who started a large ad agency in Austin, Texas. When Jake Sullivan and Dan Schwerin, my director of speechwriting, got on the phone with Roy to exchange notes, they were shocked to hear him propose exactly the same phrase the team in Brooklyn had come up with: Stronger Together. Our top political consultants, Joel Benenson, Mandy Grunwald, and Jim Margolis, also reached the same conclusion independently. Considering how rarely all these smart people agreed on anything, we took it as a sign. Stronger Together it would be.

By the time I got to our convention, I felt even better about this decision.

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