“Prideful, aggrieved, confused – and still high on the notion she was leading an army, Napoleon in a navy pantsuit and gumball-sized fake pearls.”
So begins the damning portrait Heilemann and Halperin paint of then-Senator Clinton.
Perceiving the young senator from Illinois as a mere distraction, Clinton expected to coast to victory in the nominating contest, according to “Game Change.” “Hillary could still barely fathom that he was in the race at all,” Heilemann and Halperin write.
As early as 18 months before the November general election, Clinton began contemplating whom she would choose as her running mate and considering her transition to the White House. She “had already determined without a sliver of doubt that she was not going to choose Obama,” the authors write. She had even asked Roger Altman, deputy Treasury secretary in her husband’s administration, to lead a secret project planning her transition to the White House.
The worst blow came in Iowa, when Clinton lost the state primary, according to Heilemann and Halperin. As her “senior-most lieutenants” watched her “bitter and befuddled reaction,” they write, they thought, “This woman shouldn’t be president.”
