Undelivered by Jeff Nussbaum

Author:Jeff Nussbaum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

On most presidential campaigns, the candidate’s “closing argument” would get road tested and honed over the waning days of the campaign. In fact, that’s how most campaigns operate; from the final debate through Election Day, it’s all about building an argument that reaches its apotheosis on Election Night.

But like so much of Hillary’s seemingly snakebit campaign, unwelcome events intervened.

On the afternoon of October 28, with eleven days to go before the election, news broke that FBI director James Comey had sent a letter to Congress saying that the FBI had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” into the private email server that Clinton had set up and used when she was secretary of state.

Clinton was en route from Cedar Rapids to Des Moines, Iowa, when the news hit. Upon arrival in Des Moines, she made a statement in which she expressed her confidence that any new emails wouldn’t change the conclusion that there had been no wrongdoing. There’s an old political saying: if you’re explaining, you’re losing. At a time when a campaign wants to be playing offense, the Clinton campaign was in frenetic motion, trying to limit the damage.

As campaign pollster Joel Benenson pointed out, “We had come out of the third debate strong. That Comey letter interrupted our momentum. Any day Hillary’s emails were in the news was a bad day.”

And so, as much of the campaign’s high command was consumed with the Comey letter and its fallout, the task of writing the Election Night speech fell to chief speechwriter Dan Schwerin.

Schwerin had begun interning for Hillary Clinton in 2004 when Hillary was serving as a senator, and was hired on in 2006 to be the assistant to then chief of staff Tamara Luzzatto. For fun, he began writing up and emailing out the postgame reports of the Hill’s Angels, the Clinton staff softball team. Hillary enjoyed the write-ups immensely, and Schwerin soon found himself in the press office, working with Communications Director Philippe Reines and speechwriter Jon Lovett.

When Clinton announced her first run for president, in 2007, Schwerin stayed in the Senate, handling the remaining official work, and writing short speeches and video scripts.

When Barack Obama became president and Hillary joined the administration as secretary of state, Hillary’s confidante Lissa Muscatine headed to Foggy Bottom to become her director of speechwriting and Schwerin received what he called his “proper speechwriting education” working for her.

When Secretary Clinton left the State Department, she tapped Schwerin to help her write her memoir of the State Department years, Hard Choices. And when she geared up for her second run for president, Schwerin was a natural choice to serve as her lead speechwriter.

Now Schwerin was working on the most important speech of his career, and he added his own goals and concerns to those that had been expressed by Sullivan and Palmieri. He wanted to make sure that nobody forgot that this was a victory, and he wanted to give Hillary’s supporters a victory lap.

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