What Happened

Change Makers

One of the most persistent challenges I faced as a candidate was being perceived as a defender of the status quo, while my opponents in the primaries and the general election seized the sought-after mantle of “change.” The same thing happened to me in 2008. I never could figure out how to shake it.

Change might be the most powerful word in American politics. It’s also one of the hardest to define. In 1992 and 2008, change meant electing dynamic young leaders who promised hope and renewal. In 2016, it meant handing a lit match to a pyromaniac.

The yearning for change springs from deep in the character of our restless, questing, constantly-reinventing-itself country. That’s part of what makes America great. But we don’t always spend enough time thinking about what it takes to actually make the change we seek. Change is hard. That’s one reason we’re sometimes taken in by leaders who make it sound easy but don’t have any idea how to get anything done. Too often we fail to think big enough or act fast enough and let opportunities for change slip away. Or we don’t have the patience to see things through.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a change maker for most of my life. My journey took me from student-activist to citizen-advocate to politician–policy maker. Along the way, I never stopped searching for the right balance of idealism and realism. Sometimes I had to make painful compromises. But I’ve also had the great privilege of meeting people whose lives were healthier, freer, and fuller because of my work. Today, despite losing in 2016, I am more convinced than ever that driving progress in a big, raucous democracy like ours requires a mix of principle and pragmatism—plus a whole lot of persistence.

Nobody did more to help me understand this than Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund and my first boss. When I met her in the spring of 1970, her accomplishments were already stunning. She was the first black woman to pass the bar exam in Mississippi, after having graduated from Yale Law School in 1963. She became a civil rights lawyer for the NAACP in Jackson and established a Head Start program for poor kids who desperately needed it. Marian worked with Dr. King and opened Bobby Kennedy’s eyes to the reality of poverty in America by taking him to tiny shacks in the Mississippi Delta and introducing him to children so hungry they were nearly catatonic.

Marian showed me what it takes to make real and lasting change. She gave me my start as an activist, held me to account as I grew into a national leader, and was there for me when things fell apart as a candidate.

I was in my early twenties when I met Marian, but I’d already spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to be an effective activist.

My parents—especially my mother—raised me and my brothers in the Methodist tradition of “faith in action.” At church, we were taught to be “doers of the word, not hearers only.” That meant stepping outside the pews, rolling up our sleeves, and doing “all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can.” That credo, attributed to the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, inspired generations of Methodists to volunteer in hospitals, schools, and slums. For me, growing up in a comfortable middle-class suburb, it provided a sense of purpose and direction, pointing me toward a life of public service.

My activist faith was sharpened by the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. In college and law school, my friends and I spent many long nights debating the morality and efficacy of civil disobedience, dodging the draft, and other forms of resistance. What would it take to end an unjust war in Vietnam, expand civil rights and women’s rights, and combat poverty and injustice? Should our goal be reform or revolution? Consensus or conflict? Should we protest or participate?

The “Left,” of which we considered ourselves a part, was divided. Radicals talked about revolution and believed conflict was the only way to drive change. Not surprisingly, I agreed more with the liberals who argued that the system had to be reformed from the inside. Partly it was a question of temperament—I’m a pragmatist by both nature and nurture—but I was also watching and learning as events swirled around me.

At Wellesley, I tried to find ways to push the college toward more progressive positions through negotiation rather than disruption. I ran for student government president in 1968 because I thought I could do a good job convincing college administrators to make changes that students wanted. My platform included adding students to faculty committees, recruiting more students and faculty of color, opening up the curriculum, and easing curfews and other social restrictions. I won and spent the next year trying to translate the demands of restive students into measurable change on campus.

That summer, I was in Chicago’s Grant Park when antiwar protests outside the Democratic National Convention turned into a melee that shocked the nation. My longtime close friend Betsy Ebeling and I narrowly missed being hit by a rock thrown by someone in the crowd behind us. Mayor Richard Daley’s police force was clearly more to blame for the violence than the kids in the park were. But the whole scene left me worried that the antiwar movement was causing a backlash that would help elect Richard Nixon and prolong the war. It was a terrifying, infuriating, exhilarating, and confusing time to be a young activist in America.

In May 1970, just a few days after four unarmed college student protesters were shot and killed by National Guardsmen on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio, I spoke to the fiftieth anniversary convention of the League of Women Voters in Washington. The civic organization had invited me after my Wellesley graduation speech made national news the previous year. I wore a black armband in memory of the students who had been killed at Kent State. In my remarks, I tried to explain the tension so many young activists were feeling, wavering “back and forth between thinking that talk at this point was useless, and believing somehow that we had to continue using words.” This was a time when eighteen-year-old kids could be drafted to fight a war they believed was wrong but didn’t yet have the right to vote. Many of my peers were beside themselves with anger and despair. They had given up hope that progress was possible, at least through traditional means.

I had read an article in the Washington Post about League of Women Voters members holding a vigil on the steps of the Capitol to protest Nixon’s recent invasion of Cambodia. Nixon had promised to end the war and now seemed to be escalating it instead. I believed invading Cambodia was both immoral and illegal. But I knew not everyone in the audience wanted to hear this. That vigil at the Capitol was controversial, even internally. One member from Connecticut who had not participated was quoted by the Post as saying she didn’t believe in protests and was afraid the vigil would tar the league’s reputation. I thought that was absurd and said so. “Not to stand up and protest today against the forces of death is to be counted among them,” I said, using the kind of hypercharged language that was common back then, at least for student activists. “People—living, breathing, caring human beings—who have never been involved before must be now. The luxury of long-range deliberation and verbiage-laden analysis must be forgone in favor of action.”

Despite the hot (and verbiage-laden!) rhetoric, my idea of action wasn’t terribly radical. I urged league members to use their economic power—“Do you know what kind of activities the corporations that you invest in are engaged in? How much longer can we let corporations run us?”—and to help antiwar activists use the political system more effectively. I felt passionately that nobody could sit on the sidelines in a time of such upheaval.

Considering everything that was going on, my friends and I sometimes wondered whether going to Yale Law School was a morally defensible choice or if we were selling out. A few of our classmates were indeed there just to open the door to a big paycheck and the chance to defend corporations that exploited workers and consumers. But for many of us, our legal education was arming us with a powerful new weapon as activists. The law could seem arid and abstract in our classrooms and textbooks, but we cheered for crusading lawyers across the country who were driving change by challenging injustices in court. When I started volunteering at the New Haven Legal Services Clinic, I saw firsthand how the law could improve or harm lives. I still believed there was a place for protests—and I moderated a mass meeting at Yale where students voted for a campus strike after the Kent State shootings, in part because the male students couldn’t agree which of them should take charge—but more and more, I was coming to see how the system could be changed through hard work and reform.

All this crystalized for me when I went to work for Marian at the Children’s Defense Fund. She sent me to her home state of South Carolina to gather evidence for a lawsuit seeking to end the practice of incarcerating teenagers in jails with adults. A civil rights lawyer lent me his car, and I drove all over the state going to courthouses, meeting with parents of thirteen-, fourteen-, or fifteen-year-old boys who were stuck in jail with grown men who had committed serious felonies. It was eye-opening and outrageous.

Next, I went undercover—really!—in Dothan, Alabama, to expose segregated schools that were trying to evade integration. Posing as the young wife of a businessman who had just been transferred to the area, I visited the all-white private school that had just opened in town and received tax-exempt status. When I started asking questions about the student body and curriculum, I was assured that no black students would be enrolled. Marian used the evidence that I and other activists gathered in the field to pressure the Nixon administration to crack down on these so-called segregated academies. It was thrilling work because it felt meaningful and real. After years spent studying social justice from a distance, I was finally doing something.

Another early job for Marian was going door-to-door in a working-class Portuguese neighborhood in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to figure out why so many families were keeping their children out of school. One answer was that, in those days, most schools couldn’t accommodate children with disabilities, so those kids had no choice but to stay home. I’ll never forget meeting one young girl in a wheelchair on the small back porch of her house. She told me how badly she wanted to go to school. But the wheelchair made it impossible. It seemed like it should be such a simple problem to solve.

This became a clarifying moment for me. I had been raised to believe in the power of reason, evidence, argument, and in the centrality of fairness and equality. As a campus liberal in the foment of the sixties, I took “consciousness raising” seriously. But talking about fairness alone wouldn’t get a ramp built for this girl’s wheelchair at the local public school. Raising public awareness would be necessary but not sufficient for changing school policies and hiring and training new staff to give students with disabilities an equal education. Instead of waiting for a revolution, the kind of change this girl needed was more likely to look like the sociologist Max Weber’s description of politics: “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” I felt ready to do it.

Under Marian’s leadership, we gathered data to document the scope of the problem. We wrote a report. We built a coalition of like-minded organizations. And we went to Washington to argue our case. It took until 1975, but the Children’s Defense Fund’s work eventually helped convince Congress to pass the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, requiring all public schools to make accommodations for students with disabilities.

This kind of work isn’t glamorous. But my experience with CDF convinced me that this is how you make real change in America: step by step, year by year, sometimes even door by door. You need to stir up public opinion and put pressure on political leaders. You have to shift policies and resources. And you need to win elections. You need to change hearts and change laws.

Although I never imagined running for office myself, I came to see partisan politics as the most viable route in a democracy for achieving significant and lasting progress. Then, as now, plenty of progressive activists preferred to stand apart from party politics. Some saw both Democrats and Republicans as corrupt and compromised. Others were discouraged by repeated defeats. It was soul crushing to watch Democrats lose every single presidential election between 1968 and 1988 except one. But despite it all, I was attracted to politics. Even when I grew disillusioned, I knew that winning elections was the key that could unlock the change our country needed. So I stuffed envelopes for Gene McCarthy in New Hampshire, registered voters for George McGovern in Texas, set up field offices for Jimmy Carter in Indiana, and enthusiastically supported my husband’s decision to run for office in Arkansas.

My identity as an advocate and activist remained important to me as I grew older. When I myself was lobbied and protested as a public official, it was a little like stepping through the looking glass. Whenever I grew frustrated, I’d remind myself how it felt to be on the other side of the table or out in the street with a sign and a megaphone. I’d been there. I knew that the activists giving me a hard time were doing their jobs, trying to drive progress and hold leaders accountable. That kind of pressure is not just important—it’s mission-critical for a healthy democracy. As FDR supposedly told a group of civil rights leaders, “Okay, you’ve convinced me. Now make me do it.”

Still, there was an inherent tension. Some activists and advocates saw their role as putting pressure on people in power, including allies, and they weren’t interested in compromise. They didn’t have to strike deals with Republicans or worry about winning elections. But I did. There are principles and values we should never compromise, but to be an effective leader in a democracy, you need flexible strategies and tactics, especially under difficult political conditions. I learned that the hard way during our battle for health care reform in the early nineties. Reluctance to compromise can bring about defeat. The forces opposed to change have it easier. They can just say no, again and again, and blame the other side when it doesn’t happen. If you want to get something done, you have to find a way to get to yes.

So I’ve never had much respect for activists who are willing to sit out elections, waste their votes, or tear down well-meaning allies rather than engage constructively. Making the perfect the enemy of the good is shortsighted and counterproductive. And when someone on the left starts talking about how there’s no difference between the two parties or that electing a right-wing Republican might somehow hasten “the revolution,” it’s just unfathomably wrong.

When I was Secretary of State, I met in Cairo with a group of young Egyptian activists who had helped organize the demonstrations in Tahrir Square that shocked the world by toppling President Hosni Mubarak in early 2011. They were intoxicated by the power of their protests but showed little interest in organizing political parties, drafting platforms, running candidates, or building coalitions. Politics wasn’t for them, they said. I feared what that would mean for their future. I believed they were essentially handing the country over to the two most organized forces in Egypt: the Muslim Brotherhood and the military. In the years ahead, both fears proved correct.

I had similar conversations with some Black Lives Matter activists during the 2016 campaign. I respected how effectively their movement grabbed hold of the national debate. I welcomed it when activists such as Brittany Packnett and DeRay Mckesson pressed me on specific issues and engaged constructively with my team and me to make our platform better and stronger. And I was honored when they endorsed me for President. But I was concerned when other activists proved more interested in disruption and confrontation than in working together to change policies that perpetuate systemic racism.

This was on my mind during a memorable encounter with a few young activists in August 2015. They had driven up from Boston to attend one of my town hall meetings in Keene, New Hampshire. Well, attend is not quite the right word. Disrupt is more accurate. The town hall was focused on the growing problem of opioid abuse that was ravaging small towns across America, but the activists were determined to grab the spotlight for a different epidemic: the young black men and women being killed in encounters with police, as well as the broader systemic racism that devalued black lives and perpetuated inequities in education, housing, employment, and the justice system. In short: a cause worth fighting for.

They arrived too late to get into the town hall, but my staff suggested that we meet afterward so the activists could raise their concerns directly with me. Maybe we could even have a constructive back-and-forth. It started well enough. We were standing backstage in a small circle, which gave the discussion an intimate directness.

“What you’re doing as activists and as people who are constantly raising these issues is really important,” I said. “We can’t get change unless there’s constant pressure.” Then I asked a question that I’d been wondering about for some time: how they planned to build on their early success. “We need a whole comprehensive plan. I am more than happy to work with you guys,” I said.

But these activists didn’t want to talk about developing a policy agenda. One was singularly focused on getting me to accept personal responsibility for having supported policies, especially the crime bill that my husband signed in 1994, which he claimed created a culture of mass incarceration. “You, Hillary Clinton, have been in no uncertain way, partially responsible for this. More than most,” he declared.

I thought these activists were right that it was time for public officials—and all Americans, really—to stop tiptoeing around the brutal role that racism has played in our history and continues to play in our politics. But his view of the ’94 crime bill was oversimplified beyond recognition.

The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act was passed during the crack epidemic that ravaged America’s cities in the 1980s and early 1990s. It included important and positive provisions, such as the Violence Against Women Act and a ban on assault weapons. It set up special drug courts to keep first-time offenders out of prison, funded after-school and job opportunities for at-risk young people, and provided resources to hire and train more police officers. Unfortunately, the only way to pass the law was to also include measures that congressional Republicans demanded. They insisted on longer federal sentences for drug offenders. States that were already increasing penalties were emboldened. States that weren’t doing so, started to. And all that led to higher rates of incarceration across the country. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Joe Biden helped write the compromise legislation. Bernie Sanders voted for it. So did most congressional Democrats. It was also supported by many black leaders determined to stop the crime wave decimating their communities. As Yale Law School professor James Forman Jr. explains in his book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, “African Americans have always viewed the protection of black lives as a civil rights issue, whether the threat comes from police officers or street criminals.”

So, yes, the crime bill was flawed. It was a tough compromise. And it’s fair to say, as Bill himself has done in the years since, that the negative consequences took a heavy toll, especially in poor and minority communities. “I signed a bill that made the problem worse,” Bill said at a national conference of the NAACP in July 2015, referring to excessive incarceration. I agreed with him, which is why I was the first candidate to call for “an end to the era of mass incarceration” and proposed an aggressive agenda for criminal justice reform. It’s painful now to think about how we’re going backward on these issues under President Trump, with an Attorney General who favors longer sentences for drug offenders and less oversight of police departments, and who is hostile to civil rights and voting rights across the board.

So I understood the frustration of the Black Lives Matter activists, and I respected their conviction. I knew they spoke from a lifetime of being ignored and disrespected by authority figures. But I kept trying to steer the conversation back to the question of how to develop and advance a concrete agenda on racial justice.

“There has to be some positive vision and plan that you can move people toward,” I said. “The consciousness raising, the advocacy, the passion, the youth of your movement is so critical. But now all I’m suggesting is—even for us sinners—find some common ground on agendas that can make a difference right here and now in people’s lives.”

We went round and round awhile longer on these questions, but it felt like we were talking past one another. I don’t think any of us left the conversation very satisfied.

I took seriously the policies some of the Black Lives Matter activists later put forward to reform the criminal justice system and invest in communities of color. I asked Maya and our team to work closely with them. We incorporated the best of their ideas into our plans, along with input from civil rights organizations that had been in the trenches for decades. In October 2015, my friend Alexis Herman, the former Secretary of Labor, hosted a meeting in Washington for me with another group of activists. We had an engaging discussion about how to improve policing, build trust, and create a sense of security and opportunity in black neighborhoods. They spoke about feeling not only like outsiders in America but intruders—like someone no one wants, no one values. As one woman put it, “If you look like me, your life doesn’t have worth.” It was wrenching to hear a young American say that.

Finding the right balance between principle and pragmatism isn’t easy. One example of how hard that was for me was the effort to reform welfare in the nineties—another tough compromise that remains controversial. Bill and I both believed that change was needed to help more people get the tools and support to transition from welfare to work, including assistance with health care and childcare. But Republicans in Congress were determined to rip up the social safety net. They wanted to slash funding and guarantees for welfare, Medicaid, school lunches, and food stamps; deny all benefits even to documented immigrants; and send children born out of wedlock to teen mothers to orphanages—all while offering little support to people who wanted to find work. It was cold-blooded. I encouraged Bill to veto the Republican plan, which he did. They passed it again with only minimal changes. So he vetoed it again. Then Congress passed a compromise plan. It was still flawed but on balance seemed like it would help more than it hurt.

It was a hard call. Bill and I lay awake at night talking it over. The new plan no longer block granted Medicaid and food stamps and instead put more money into them, along with childcare, housing, and transportation for people moving from welfare to work. We hoped Bill’s administration would be able to fix some of the legislation’s problems in a second term and keep pressing to do more to help Americans lift themselves out of poverty. Ultimately, he decided to accept the bad with the good and sign the legislation into law.

Two of the loudest voices opposing the compromise plan belonged to Marian Wright Edelman and her husband, Peter, who was an Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services. Marian wrote an impassioned op-ed in the Washington Post calling this the “defining moral litmus test” of Bill’s presidency. Peter resigned in protest. I respected Marian’s and Peter’s position—in fact, I expected no less from them—but it was painful to see one of the defining relationships of my life become strained.

There was never a full breach, and eventually we were drawn back together by the same shared passions that made us such close friends in the first place. Marian and I both threw ourselves into the fight to create the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which emerged out of the ashes of the Clinton administration’s failure to pass universal health care reform in 1993–1994. I learned a lot of lessons about what it takes to get things done in Congress, including how to work across the aisle and lean more effectively on outside allies like Marian. Those lessons paid off when CHIP became a bipartisan success story that continues to provide health care to millions of kids every year. Now Donald Trump proposes dismantling the program, which would be tragic.

In 1999, when I paid a visit to the Children’s Defense Fund’s farm in Tennessee for the dedication of a library in honor of the writer Langston Hughes, Marian and I went for a long walk around the grounds. It felt good to be back by her side. The next year, I watched with great pride as Bill awarded Marian the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her lifetime of advocacy.

Looking back, our disagreement over welfare reform was a testament to how deeply we both cared about policy—and to how different it is to be an advocate on the outside as opposed to a policy maker on the inside. What didn’t change, though, and what ultimately brought us back together, was the passion we shared for children.

For me, it always comes back to children. The one core belief I’ve articulated more often and more fervently than any other in all my years in public life is that every child deserves the chance to live up to his or her God-given potential. I’ve said that line so many times, I’ve lost count. But the idea remains as powerful and motivating for me as ever. I continue to believe that a society should be judged by how we treat the most vulnerable among us, especially children, and that the measure of our success should be how many kids climb out of poverty, get a good education, and receive the love and support they deserve.

This has been a consistent through-line of my career, starting with my days with Marian at the Children’s Defense Fund, and my work as a law student on early childhood development at the Yale Child Study Center and on child abuse at Yale–New Haven Hospital. Maybe it goes back even further, to the lessons I learned from my mother about her own painful childhood. She went out of her way to help girls in our town who were in trouble, in need, or just looking for a friend, because she believed that every child deserves a chance and a champion. I came to believe that too, and in every job I’ve ever held, I’ve tried to be that champion. It’s a big part of why I ran for President and what I’d hoped to accomplish if I won.

I’m sure that in our hypercynical age, this sounds like just a lot of happy talk—the kind of thing politicians say when they’re trying to show their softer side. After all, who doesn’t love kids? Everybody professes to, even when their policies would actually hurt children. But I mean it. This is real for me.

Nothing makes me more furious than seeing kids get taken advantage of or mistreated—or not getting the opportunity, the support, the encouragement, and the security they need to succeed. You’ve already read about how hard it is for women in politics to express anger the way men do, and how I’ve struggled with the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t double bind that presents. But for me, there’s always been an exception when it comes to children. I have zero patience for adults who hurt or neglect kids. My temper just boils over. That’s what sparked many of the big battles I’ve taken on in my career.

For example, I fought so hard for health care reform in the nineties in part because of some children I met at a hospital in Cleveland. The kids all had preexisting conditions, so their families couldn’t get insurance. One father of two little girls with cystic fibrosis told me the insurance company said, “Sorry, we don’t insure burning houses.” He pointed to his girls with tears in his eyes and said, “They called my little girls burning houses.” His words nearly knocked the wind out of me. And the thought of those kids kept me going through every stumble and setback, until we finally convinced Congress to pass CHIP.

I had a similar experience early in 2016, when I read a story in the newspaper about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. An alarming number of children were sick with lead poisoning, apparently because state authorities had failed to properly test or treat the water supply. I spent years as First Lady and as a Senator working to reduce the danger to kids from lead paint poisoning, which threatens the health of hundreds of thousands of young children across our country. But I’d never even heard of anything like what was happening in Flint.

The city used to be a thriving center for auto manufacturing, but, as vividly documented in Michael Moore’s 1989 film Roger & Me, the city was slowly hollowed out by plant closings and job losses. By 2013, the median household income was less than $25,000, and more than 40 percent of residents, most of them black, lived in poverty. In 2013 and 2014, the city’s emergency fiscal manager appointed by Michigan’s Republican Governor came up with a plan to save a little money: instead of buying drinking water from Detroit’s municipal system, as the city had long done, it would draw from the Flint River.

Almost immediately, families in town began to complain about the color, taste, and odor of the water, as well as rashes and other health concerns. Parents brought bottles of brown, smelly water to show officials. “This is what my baby is drinking,” they said. “This is what she bathes in.” They were ignored or given false assurances that the water was safe to drink. It was the cruelest kind of indifference. It turns out the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality never treated the river water with an anticorrosive agent that would have cost just $200 a day. That violation of federal law caused lead to leach from pipes into the city’s water. Children under the age of five years old are the most vulnerable to lead poisoning, which can irreparably harm brain development and cause learning and behavioral problems. In Flint, thousands of kids may have been exposed, and the rate of lead poisoning diagnosed among children nearly doubled.

For two years or so, the state government hardly did anything about the problem. It wasn’t until a group of outside doctors performed their own testing and exposed just how toxic the water was that the public health crisis became national news. When I heard about it in January 2016, I was appalled. I asked members of my team to go to Flint right away and see if they could learn more. I also called the Mayor, Karen Weaver, and asked, “What can I do to help?” She was eager for anything that would put a spotlight on Flint and pressure on the Governor to finally help fix things.

So that’s exactly what I did. I raised a ruckus out on the campaign trail and on television, and called on the Governor to declare a state of emergency, which would trigger federal aid. Within a few hours, he did. That just made me more determined to keep banging the drum. At the end of the next Democratic primary debate, the moderator, Lester Holt, asked, “Is there anything that you really wanted to say tonight that you haven’t gotten a chance to say?” I jumped at the opportunity to tell a national audience about what was happening in Flint.

“Every single American should be outraged,” I said. “A city in the United States of America where the population which is poor in many ways and majority African American has been drinking and bathing in lead-contaminated water—and the Governor of that state acted as though he didn’t really care.” I was getting pretty worked up. “I’ll tell you what,” I continued, “if the kids in a rich suburb of Detroit had been drinking contaminated water and being bathed in it, there would’ve been action.”

That comment may have made some people uncomfortable, but it’s hard to deny that what happened in Flint never would have happened in an affluent community like Grosse Pointe. State authorities would have rushed to help, and resources would have poured in. By the same token, the schools in wealthy Bloomfield Hills are never going to look like the schools in Detroit, where children sit in classrooms infested with rodents and mold, with ceilings caving in and the heat barely functioning. All across the country, there are examples of poor communities and communities of color living with dangerous levels of toxic pollution—and it’s always children who pay the biggest price.

After the debate, my campaign team was thrilled. Finally, they thought I was showing the kind of passion they believed voters wanted to see. For months, we had been losing the “outrage primary.” Bernie was outraged about everything. He thundered on at every event about the sins of “the millionaires and billionaires.” I was more focused on offering practical solutions that would address real problems and make life better for people. But now, in defense of those sick kids in Flint, I was the one full of righteous indignation.

A couple weeks later, I went to Flint to see what was happening for myself. It was even more heartbreaking than I imagined. Mayor Weaver and I sat down with a group of mothers in the pastor’s office of the House of Prayer Missionary Baptist Church. I noticed that the church’s water fountains were all marked “Out of Order,” a small reminder of what this town had been living with for the past two years.

Then the mothers told me their stories. One shared that she’d been pregnant with twins when she had a reaction to the poisoned water. “It was so horrible,” she said. First, she went to the emergency room with a rash. Then she had a miscarriage and needed a blood transfusion. It was emotionally devastating. What’s more, it bothered her that every resident had to pay a hefty fee to use the water in the first place. Imagine, she said, “paying for poison.”

“I have seizures now. That’s something I didn’t have before,” another mom told me, fighting back tears. “Our lives have been just so damaged.”

“Our conversations are not about birthdays anymore. They’re not about swimming lessons,” said a third mother. “They’re about hospital visits and going to the ER.”

One mom, Nakiya, introduced me to her adorable six-year-old son, Jaylon. He was scampering around us, taking pictures with a phone, smiling from ear to ear. Nakiya told me he’d been exposed to high levels of lead and was now having trouble in school. All I wanted to do was scoop Jaylon up in my arms, hold him tight, and promise that everything was going to be okay. Later, after speaking to the church congregation, I found Nakiya and Jaylon again. Barb Kinney, our campaign photographer, asked if he’d like to try out her fancy Nikon camera. Jaylon’s eyes got big as flashbulbs, and he nodded his head. Soon he was snapping shots like a pro.

Before we left, I gave Jaylon a big hug. But I couldn’t promise that everything would be okay or that the problems in Flint would go away anytime soon. In fact, I was worried that Republicans in Michigan and Washington still weren’t taking the crisis seriously.

I wanted to do more to help. The people of Flint couldn’t wait for the next election. They certainly couldn’t wait for the Revolution. They needed change right away. “The Mayor said something that struck me,” I told a few local leaders. “Rather than have people come in from the outside, let’s hire people from the inside. Every church could be a dispensing station or an organizing hub.” We made plans to keep in touch.

As soon as I got on the plane, I turned to Maya. I was burning with frustration over what I’d seen. “How could this have happened?” I fumed. “It’s criminal! We’ve got to do something about it.” Over the next several weeks, we worked with Mayor Weaver, local pastors, the community college, the NAACP, and others to line up support and funding for a new public-private partnership that hired unemployed young people to deliver clean water to families who needed it. Chelsea made two visits of her own and helped launch the Mayor’s program. People from across the country also answered the call to help. Hundreds of union plumbers arrived to install water filters for free. Students at universities all over the Midwest raised funds for clean water deliveries. A kindergartner in New Hampshire, who lost his first tooth and received $5 from the tooth fairy, told his parents he wanted to donate it “so those little kids can have water.” His mom was so proud, she sat down right away and wrote me a letter about it.

The situation in Flint is still dire. It’s heartbreaking and outrageous. This is not something that should ever happen in America, period. It’s lousy governance and shameful politics at their worst. It took until the end of 2016 for Congress to agree on a relief package. Most of the city’s thirty thousand lead-based water pipes have yet to be replaced, forcing residents to continue to rely on bottled and boiled water. Five state officials, including the head of Michigan’s health department, have been charged with involuntary manslaughter. Meanwhile, the schools are still inadequate, there aren’t enough jobs, and too many children go to bed hungry.

This still infuriates me. But I do take some comfort in the compassion and generosity that many Americans showed when they learned about the crisis. One of the most rewarding parts of running for President was getting to see that spirit up close, in a million ways. For example, one day in September 2015, I held a town hall meeting in Exeter, New Hampshire. One of the residents who stood up to ask a question was a ninth-grade teacher, in the classroom for thirteen years, asking how we can help kids from low-income families find more opportunities for summer enrichment. Then a young woman stood up. She was just back from a year of working in a middle school in the Watts section of Los Angeles, through the AmeriCorps national service program. Next was someone who works with young survivors of commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking. Then a twenty-two-year veteran of the Navy with a son on active duty in the Marine Corps. One after another, these Americans asked me their questions, and each of them had his or her own extraordinary story of service and giving back to the community. That’s part of what I love about America. Those people in Exeter, and everyone who lent a hand to help out in Flint, are examples of how real change happens. Progress comes from rolling up your sleeves and getting to work.

To me, Flint was so much more than something to rail about on the campaign trail, even if outrage is good politics. And in this case, it’s possible that it wasn’t good politics. I don’t know if my advocacy for the heavily African American community of Flint alienated white voters in other parts of Michigan, but it certainly didn’t seem to help, as I lost the state narrowly in both the primary and the general election. Either way, that’s not what it was about for me. There were real live kids to help. Kids like Jaylon. And as I learned from Marian Wright Edelman nearly a half century ago, there’s nothing more important than that.

Marian had one more lesson to teach me. In the dark days immediately following November 8, 2016, when all I wanted to do was curl up in bed and never leave the house again, Marian sent me a message. Come back to CDF, she said. The Children’s Defense Fund was hosting a celebration in Washington for an inspiring group of kids who had beaten the odds, thriving despite poverty, violence, and abandonment. Before the election, Marian had asked me to deliver the keynote. Now she wanted me to know that it was even more important that I come.

It was hard to imagine giving a speech so soon after conceding the election. But if there was anyone who knew how to pick herself up, get back on her feet, and get back to work, it was Marian. She’d been doing it all her life and helping the rest of us do it too. For decades, I’d heard Marian say, “Service is the rent we pay for living.” Well, I decided, you don’t get to stop paying rent just because things don’t go your way.

So there we were, on November 16, together again at the Children’s Defense Fund. Marian stepped to the podium, and talked about our long partnership and all we’d done together to lift up children and families. Then she pointed to her two granddaughters sitting in the audience and said, “Because of all the paths she’s paved for them, one day soon your daughter or my daughter or our granddaughters are going to sit in that Oval Office, and we can thank Hillary Rodham Clinton.” I wanted to cry and curse and cheer all at the same time.

Sweating the Details

“The decisions a Commander in Chief makes can have a profound and lasting impact on all Americans, but none more so than the brave men and women who serve, fight, and die for our country.” That was Matt Lauer introducing NBC’s “Commander in Chief Forum” from the deck of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Intrepid on September 7, 2016. I was standing just offstage listening to his introduction, nodding my head.

Lauer promised the forum would be an opportunity to “talk about national security and the complex global issues that face our nation.” That’s exactly what I wanted. With Election Day just two months away, it was time to have a serious discussion about each candidate’s qualifications to be President and how he or she would lead the country. This wouldn’t be a formal debate with me and Donald Trump onstage at the same time. Instead, we’d each do our own thirty-minute session answering questions from Lauer and the audience. I was confident that with a real focus on substance and a clear contrast of our records, Americans would see that I was ready to be Commander in Chief, and Donald Trump was dangerously unprepared.

Plus, I happen to love talking about foreign policy. As Secretary of State, I got to do that pretty much nonstop for four years in 112 countries. But as a candidate for President, I was rarely asked about anything beyond domestic issues. One exception was during a campaign stop in Iowa, when a voter asked a question about the dangers of unexploded bombs from the Vietnam War left behind in Laos. It was so surprising, I nearly dropped the microphone.

Lauer and NBC were promoting this forum as a chance to finally get serious about foreign policy and national security. I was slightly surprised that Trump had agreed to it. He had been tripped up on easy questions about nuclear weapons (he said that more countries could have them, including Saudi Arabia), NATO (he called it obsolete), torture (he was for it), and prisoners of war (he said he prefers soldiers who don’t get captured). He kept lying about opposing the Iraq War even after a recording emerged of him saying he supported it. And he had a penchant for saying absurd things such as “I know more about ISIS than the Generals do, believe me.” Nobody believed him. In fact, more than a hundred senior national security officials from Republican administrations publicly denounced him. Many signed a letter warning that Trump “lacks the character, values, and experience” to be Commander in Chief. They wrote that he would be “the most reckless President in American history,” and would “put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”

Trump’s campaign signed up for this forum nonetheless. They won a coin toss and chose to go second. So there I was, waiting in the wings for Lauer to call me out to the stage.

He began with a broad question about the most important characteristic that a Commander in Chief can possess. I used my answer to talk about steadiness, a quality that nobody ever associates with Donald Trump. Lauer cut in to say, “You’re talking about judgment.” That wasn’t what I was talking about, exactly, but it was close enough. “Temperament and judgment, yes,” I replied.

I’ve been around the block enough times to know that something bad was coming. Lauer had the look of someone proud of himself for having laid a clever trap.

“The word judgment has been used a lot around you, Secretary Clinton, over the last year and a half, and in particular concerning your use of your personal email and server to communicate while you were Secretary of State,” Lauer said. “You’ve said it’s a mistake. You said you made not the best choice. You were communicating on highly sensitive topics. Why wasn’t it more than a mistake? Why wasn’t it disqualifying, if you want to be Commander in Chief?”

It was disappointing but predictable that he had so quickly steered the supposedly high-minded “Commander in Chief Forum” to the subject of emails, months after the director of the FBI had announced there was no case and closed the investigation. I understood that every political reporter wanted his or her pound of flesh. But Lauer had already grilled me about emails in an interview back in April. I figured this must be about “balance.” Many in the mainstream media bend over backward to avoid criticism from the right about being soft on Democrats. If Lauer intended to ask Trump tough questions, he had to make a show of grilling me, too.

Of course, that isn’t balanced at all—because balanced doesn’t mean strictly equal. It means reasonable. It means asking smart questions backed by solid reporting and making decisions about coverage that will help people get the information they need to make sound decisions. Picking the midpoint between two sides, no matter how extreme one of them is, isn’t balanced—it’s false equivalence. If Trump ripped the shirt off someone at a rally and a button fell off my jacket on the same day, the headline “Trump and Clinton Experience Wardrobe Malfunctions, Campaigns in Turmoil” might feel equal to some, but it wouldn’t be balanced, and it definitely wouldn’t be fair. Most important, the voters wouldn’t learn anything that would help them decide who should be president.

The Lauer episode was a perfect example. I made a mistake with my emails. I apologized, I explained, I explained, and apologized some more. Yet here we were, after all these months, and after the FBI finished its work, at a forum supposed to be about the security of our country, and to balance the fact that Trump was going to have a hard time answering even the most straightforward questions, we were spending our time on emails.

After the election, a report from Professor Thomas Patterson at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy explained how damaging the pursuit of false equivalency can be. “If everything and everyone are portrayed negatively, there’s a leveling effect that opens the door to charlatans,” it said. “The press historically has helped citizens recognize the difference between the earnest politician and the pretender. Today’s news coverage blurs the distinction.”

Here I was, facing the blurring in real time, with a charlatan waiting in the wings. But what could I do? I launched into my standard answer on the emails, the one I’d given a thousand times before: “It was a mistake to have a personal account. I would certainly not do it again. I make no excuses for it,” and so forth. I also explained that, as the FBI had confirmed, none of the emails I sent or received was marked as classified.

Instead of moving on to any of a hundred urgent national security issues, from the civil war in Syria, to the Iranian nuclear agreement, to the threat from North Korea—the issues this forum was supposed to be about—Lauer stayed on emails. He asked four follow-ups. Meanwhile, the clock was ticking, and my thirty minutes to discuss serious foreign policy challenges were slipping away.

Finally, after learning absolutely nothing new or interesting, Lauer turned to a question from one of the veterans NBC had picked to be in the audience. He was a self-described Republican, a former Navy lieutenant who had served in the first Gulf War, and he promptly repeated the right-wing talking point about how my email use would have landed anyone else in prison. Then he asked how could he trust me as President “when you clearly corrupted our national security?”

Now I was ticked off. NBC knew exactly what it was doing here. The network was treating this like an episode of The Apprentice, in which Trump stars and ratings soar. Lauer had turned what should have been a serious discussion into a pointless ambush. What a waste of time.

When another veteran in the audience was finally allowed to ask about how to defeat ISIS, Lauer interrupted me before I began answering. “As briefly as you can,” he admonished. Trump should have reported his performance as an in-kind contribution.

Later, there were rumors ginned up by fake news reports that I was so mad at him I stormed off stage, threw a tantrum, and shattered a water glass. While I didn’t do any of that, I can’t say I didn’t fantasize about shaking some sense into Lauer while I was out there.

Now I wish I had pushed back hard on his question. I should have said, “You know, Matt, I was the one in the Situation Room advising the President to go after Osama bin Laden. I was with Leon Panetta and David Petraeus urging stronger action sooner in Syria. I worked to rebuild Lower Manhattan after 9/11 and provide health care to our first responders. I’m the one worried about Putin subverting our democracy. I started the negotiations with Iran to prevent a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. I’m the one national security experts trust with our country’s future.” And so much more. Here’s another example where I remained polite, albeit exasperated, and played the political game as it used to be, not as it had become. That was a mistake.

Later, I watched Lauer soft-pedal Trump’s interview. “What do you believe prepares you to make decisions that a Commander in Chief has to make?” he asked. Then he failed to call Trump out on his lies about Iraq. I was almost physically sick.

Thankfully, a lot of viewers reacted exactly the same way. The Washington Post published a stinging editorial:

Criticism of Lauer and NBC poured in. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof called the forum “an embarrassment to journalism.” Slate’s Will Saletan described it as “one of the weakest, least incisive performances I’ve seen from a presidential forum moderator.” And The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah had my favorite take: “During World War II, on multiple occasions, kamikaze planes crashed into the Intrepid, and last night Matt Lauer continued that tradition,” he said. “I don’t know what the f— he was doing, and neither did he.”

Sadly, though, millions of people watched. And in my view, the “Commander in Chief Forum” was representative of how many in the press covered the campaign as a whole. According again to Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, discussion of public policy accounted for just 10 percent of all campaign news coverage in the general election. Nearly all the rest was taken up by obsessive coverage of controversies such as email. Health care, taxes, trade, immigration, national security—all of it crammed into just 10 percent of the press coverage. The Shorenstein Center found that not a single one of my many detailed policy plans received more than a blip of press coverage. “If she had a policy agenda, it was not apparent in the news,” it concluded. “Her lengthy record of public service also received scant attention.” None of Trump’s scandals, from scamming students at Trump University, to stiffing small businesses in Atlantic City, to exploiting his foundation, to refusing to release his taxes as every presidential candidate since 1976 has done—and on and on—generated the kind of sustained, campaign-defining coverage that my emails did.

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 well: 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.

Bernie and I had a spirited contest of ideas, which was invigorating, but I nonetheless found campaigning against him to be profoundly frustrating. He didn’t seem to mind if his math didn’t add up or if his plans had no prayer of passing Congress and becoming law. For Bernie, policy was about inspiring a mass movement and forcing a conversation about the Democratic Party’s values and priorities. By that standard, I would say he succeeded. But it worried me. I’ve always believed that it’s dangerous to make big promises if you have no idea how you’re going to keep them. When you don’t deliver, it will make people even more cynical about government.

No matter how bold and progressive my policy proposals were—and they were significantly bolder and more progressive than anything President Obama or I had proposed in 2008—Bernie would come out with something even bigger, loftier, and leftier, regardless of whether it was realistic or not. That left me to play the unenviable role of spoilsport schoolmarm, pointing out that there was no way Bernie could keep his promises or deliver real results.

Jake Sullivan, my top policy advisor, told me it reminded him of a scene from the 1998 movie There’s Something About Mary. A deranged hitchhiker says he’s come up with a brilliant plan. Instead of the famous “eight-minute abs” exercise routine, he’s going to market “seven-minute abs.” It’s the same, just quicker. Then the driver, played by Ben Stiller, says, “Well, why not six-minute abs?” That’s what it was like in policy debates with Bernie. We would propose a bold infrastructure investment plan or an ambitious new apprenticeship program for young people, and then Bernie would announce basically the same thing, but bigger. On issue after issue, it was like he kept proposing four-minute abs, or even no-minute abs. Magic abs!

Someone sent me a Facebook post that summed up the dynamic in which we were caught:

Early in the race, in 2015, there was a day when Bernie and I both happened to be in the Amtrak passenger lounge at New York’s Penn Station waiting for the train to D.C. We talked for a bit, and he said he hoped we could avoid personal attacks, including on our families. I know what that’s like. I agreed and said I hoped we could keep our debates focused on substance.

Yet despite this pledge, as time went on, Bernie routinely portrayed me as a corrupt corporatist who couldn’t be trusted. His clear implication was that because I accepted campaign donations from people on Wall Street—just as President Obama had done—I was “bought and paid for.”

This attack was galling for many reasons, not least because Bernie and I agreed on the issue of campaign finance reform; the need to get dark money out of politics; and the urgency of preventing billionaires, powerful corporations, and special interests from buying elections. We both supported a constitutional amendment to overturn the disastrous Supreme Court decision in Citizens United that opened the floodgates to super PACs and secret money. I also proposed new measures to boost disclosure and transparency and to match small donor contributions, based on New York City’s successful system, which would help level the playing field for everyday Americans.

Where Bernie and I differed was that he seemed to see the dysfunction of our politics almost solely as a problem of money, whereas I thought ideology and tribalism also played significant roles. Bernie talked as if 99 percent of Americans would back his agenda if only the lobbyists and super PACs disappeared. But that wouldn’t turn small-government conservatives into Scandinavian Socialists or make religious fundamentalists embrace marriage equality and reproductive rights. I also was—and am—concerned about the Republican-led assault on voting rights, their efforts to gerrymander safe congressional districts, and the breakdown of comity in Congress. In addition to getting big money out of politics, I thought we had to wage and win the battle of ideas, while also reaching across the aisle more aggressively to hammer out compromises. That’s how we can start to break down the gridlock and actually get things done again.

Because we agreed on so much, Bernie couldn’t make an argument against me in this area on policy, so he had to resort to innuendo and impugning my character. Some of his supporters, the so-called Bernie Bros, took to harassing my supporters online. It got ugly and more than a little sexist. When I finally challenged Bernie during a debate to name a single time I changed a position or a vote because of a financial contribution, he couldn’t come up with anything. Nonetheless, his attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump’s “Crooked Hillary” campaign.

I don’t know if that bothered Bernie or not. He certainly shared my horror at the thought of Donald Trump becoming President, and I appreciated that he campaigned for me in the general election. But he isn’t a Democrat—that’s not a smear, that’s what he says. He didn’t get into the race to make sure a Democrat won the White House, he got in to disrupt the Democratic Party. He was right that Democrats needed to strengthen our focus on working families and that there’s always a danger of spending too much time courting donors because of our insane campaign finance system. He also engaged a lot of young people in the political process for the first time, which is extremely important. But I think he was fundamentally wrong about the Democratic Party—the party that brought us Social Security under Roosevelt; Medicare and Medicaid under Johnson; peace between Israel and Egypt under Carter; broad-based prosperity and a balanced budget under Clinton; and rescued the auto industry, passed health care reform, and imposed tough new rules on Wall Street under Obama. I am proud to be a Democrat and I wish Bernie were, too.

Throughout the primaries, every time I wanted to hit back against Bernie’s attacks, I was told to restrain myself. Noting that his plans didn’t add up, that they would inevitably mean raising taxes on middle-class families, or that they were little more than a pipe dream—all of this could be used to reinforce his argument that I wasn’t a true progressive. My team kept reminding me that we didn’t want to alienate Bernie’s supporters. President Obama urged me to grit my teeth and lay off Bernie as much as I could. I felt like I was in a straitjacket.

I eagerly looked forward to our first debate in October 2015. At last, that was a place where it would be appropriate to punch back. I held long prep sessions at my house to map out thrusts and parries with Jake, Ron Klain, Karen Dunn, and Bob Barnett, who played Bernie in our practice sessions.

I was determined to use this first debate with Bernie to go straight at the core differences between us. I wanted to debunk the false charge that I wasn’t a true progressive and explain why I thought Socialism was wrong for America—and that those two propositions were in no way contradictory. It was beyond frustrating that Bernie acted as if he had a monopoly on political purity and that he had set himself up as the sole arbiter of what it meant to be progressive, despite giving short shrift to important issues such as immigration, reproductive rights, racial justice, and gun safety. I believed we could and should fight both for more equal economic opportunities and greater social justice. They go hand in hand, and it’s wrong to sacrifice the latter in the name of the former.

As the date approached, the first debate took on added significance. Bernie was rising in the polls. Vice President Biden was considering jumping in the race. And I was set to testify before the Republican-created special congressional committee investigating the terrorist attacks in Benghazi. It seemed as if everything would come to a head during one week in October.

In the end, Biden bowed out. The Republicans swung at me and missed at the eleven-hour-long Benghazi hearing. And the debate went better than I could have hoped.

Beforehand, I was full of nerves but confident I had prepared as well as I possibly could and excited to finally stop biting my tongue and get in there and mix it up. I got my chance. Bernie and I clashed right out of the gate on Socialism and capitalism, whether Denmark should serve as a model for America, and what it means to be a progressive. “I love Denmark,” I said (and I do), but we aren’t Denmark. “We are the United States of America. It’s our job to rein in the excesses of capitalism so that it doesn’t run amok and doesn’t cause the kind of inequities we’re seeing in our economic system. But we would be making a grave mistake to turn our backs on what built the greatest middle class in the history of the world.” My defense of the American system of free enterprise may not have helped me with those self-identified Socialists in Iowa, but what mattered to me in that moment was saying what I believed.

The moderator, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, pressed me on whether I was really a progressive or just a squishy moderate or a shape-shifting opportunist. I explained that I had been consistent throughout my career in fighting for a set of core values and principles. “I’m a progressive,” I said, “but I’m a progressive who likes to get things done.” I thought that summed up my fundamental disagreement with Bernie fairly well.

Still, and this is important, Bernie deserves credit for understanding the political power of big, bold ideas. His call for single-payer health care, free college, and aggressive Wall Street reform inspired millions of Americans, especially young people. After I won the nomination, he and I collaborated on a plan to make college more affordable that combined the best elements of what we’d both proposed during the primaries. That kind of compromise is essential in politics if you want to get anything done. Then we worked together to write the most progressive Democratic platform in memory.

Bernie and I may have had different views about the role of policy—a road map for governing versus a tool for mobilization—but Donald Trump didn’t care about policy at all. He seemed proud of his ignorance and didn’t even pretend to come up with plans for how he’d build his wall, fix health care, bring back all the lost jobs in manufacturing and coal mining, and defeat ISIS. It was like he’d just wave a magic wand. He ridiculed me for taking the job seriously. “She’s got people that sit in cubicles writing policy all day,” he told Time magazine. “It’s just a waste of paper.” I kept waiting for reporters and voters to challenge him on his empty, deceitful promises. In previous elections, there was always a moment of reckoning when candidates had to show they were serious and their plans were credible. Not this time. Most of the press was too busy chasing ratings and scandals, and Trump was too slippery to be pinned down. He understood the needs and impulses of the political press well enough that if he gave them a new rabbit every day, they’d never catch any of them. So his reckoning never came.

Trump also refused to prepare for our debates. It showed. When we went head-to-head for the first time on September 26, 2016, at Long Island’s Hofstra University, he wilted under questioning and nearly had a full-on meltdown. He tried to turn it around by attacking me for not showing up fumbling and incoherent like he did. I wasn’t having it. Yeah, I did prepare, I said. “You know what else I prepared for? I prepared to be President.”

Later, Chuck Todd of NBC’s Meet the Press actually criticized me for being too prepared. I’m not sure how that’s possible—can you be too prepared for something so important? Does Chuck ever show up for Meet the Press and just wing it? The fact that I was up against Donald Trump—perhaps the least prepared man in history, both for the debates and for the presidency—made the comment even more puzzling. Were they so enthralled by his rabbit-a-day strategy that insults, false charges, and fact-free assertions were now the best evidence of authenticity?

I thought about that exchange often as I watched Trump’s first hundred days in office. I even allowed myself a little chuckle when he fumed, “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” He also discovered that foreign policy is harder than it looks. The President of China had to explain the complexity of the North Korea challenge to him. “After listening for ten minutes, I realized it’s not so easy,” Trump said. Can you hear my palm slapping my forehead? Sometimes it seems like Trump didn’t even want to be President at all. “This is more work than in my previous life,” he told a reporter. “I thought it would be easier.”

I can’t help but think about how different my first hundred days would have been. A haunting line from the nineteenth-century poet John Greenleaf Whittier comes to mind: “For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’ ”

Trump’s first major initiative was the Muslim ban, which immediately ran into trouble in court. Mine would have been a jobs and infrastructure package funded by raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans. He failed to start building his great, beautiful wall paid for by Mexico. I would have pushed for comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship. He appointed an Attorney General whose record on civil rights was so problematic, Coretta Scott King once warned that making him a judge would “irreparably damage” the work of her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I would have worked across the aisle on bipartisan criminal justice reform—there was a real opportunity there for progress. He tried to repeal Obamacare and strip health care away from tens of millions of Americans. I would have gone after the drug companies to bring down prices and fought for a public option to get us even closer to affordable, truly universal health care. He alienated allies like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, while embracing dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin. What would I have done? There’s nothing I was looking forward to more than showing Putin that his efforts to influence our election and install a friendly puppet had failed. Our first face-to-face meeting would really have been something. I know he must be enjoying everything that’s happened instead. But he hasn’t had the last laugh yet.

Since the election, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can do a better job of pushing policy back into our politics.

I have a new appreciation for the galvanizing power of big, simple ideas. I still think my health care and college plans were more achievable than Bernie’s and that his were fraught with problems, but they were easier to explain and understand, and that counts for a lot. It’s easy to ridicule ideas that “fit on a bumper sticker,” but there’s a reason campaigns use bumper stickers: they work.

Bernie proved again that it’s important to set lofty goals that people can organize around and dream about, even if it takes generations to achieve them. That’s what happened with universal health care. For a hundred years, Democrats campaigned on giving all Americans access to affordable, quality care. Bill and I tried to get it done in the 1990s, and we succeeded in creating CHIP, which provides coverage to millions of kids. It wasn’t until Obama was swept into office with a supermajority in the Senate that we could finally pass the Affordable Care Act. Even then, the ACA was a hodgepodge of imperfect compromises. But that historic achievement was possible only because Democrats had kept universal health care as our North Star for decades.

There’s a historical irony here: Bill’s presidency is often associated with small-bore initiatives such as midnight basketball and school uniforms—the opposite of those big, transformative ideas that liberals dream about. But that view misses so much. I believe Bill’s impact on our party and our country was profound and transformative. He reinvented a moribund party that had lost five of the previous six presidential elections, infusing it with new energy and ideas, and proving that Democrats could be pro-growth and pro-environment, pro-business and pro-labor, pro–public safety and pro–civil rights. He reversed trickle-down economics, balanced the federal budget, challenged Americans to embrace a new ethic of national service with AmeriCorps, and presided over two terms of peace and broadly shared prosperity.

The new Democratic Party he built went on to win the popular vote in six of the next seven elections between 1992 and 2016. He also inspired a generation of modernizing progressives in other Western democracies, especially Tony Blair’s New Labour Party in the United Kingdom. In short, there was nothing small bore about the Clinton presidency.

I believe my presidency also would have been transformative because of the big ideas I proposed to build an economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top. Here are a few of them:

First, we need the biggest investment in good jobs since World War II. This should include a massive infrastructure program that repairs and modernizes America’s roads, bridges, tunnels, ports, airports, and broadband networks; new incentives to attract and support manufacturing jobs in hard-hit communities from Coal Country to Indian country; debt-free college and improved training and apprenticeship programs to help people without college degrees get higher-paying jobs; support for small business by expanding access to capital and new markets and cutting taxes and red tape; a big push to expand clean energy production, including deploying half-a-billion solar panels in four years; and major investments in scientific research to create the jobs and industries of tomorrow.

Second, to make the economy fairer, we need new rules and incentives to make it easier for companies to raise wages and share profits with employees and harder for them to ship jobs overseas and bust unions. We have to make sure Wall Street can’t wreck Main Street again, and get smarter and tougher on trade so American workers aren’t caught in an unwinnable race against subsidized or state-owned industries, substandard labor conditions, or currency manipulation.

Third, we have to modernize workforce protections with a higher minimum wage, equal pay for women, paid family and medical leave, and affordable childcare. We should defend and improve the Affordable Care Act to reduce prices and expand coverage, including with a public option.

Fourth, we can pay for all of this with higher taxes on the top 1 percent of Americans who have reaped the lion’s share of income and wealth gains since 2000. This would also help reduce inequality.

I could go on, but that gives you a flavor of some of the things I would have tried to get done as President. Unfortunately, despite the fact that I talked about these ideas endlessly, they never got much media attention, and most people never heard about any of them. I failed to convince the press that economics was more important than emails. But it was. Just as frustrating is the fact that I never managed to convince some skeptics that I really was in it to help working families. I thought that based on my years fighting for health care reform, my record in helping create jobs as a Senator, my efforts to raise the alarm before the financial crisis, and my early commitment to address the opioid epidemic, people would see me as a proven change maker and a fighter for children and families. Instead, I never quite shook the false perception that I was a defender of the status quo.

In my more introspective moments, I do recognize that my campaign in 2016 lacked the sense of urgency and passion that I remember from ’92. Back then, we were on a mission to revitalize the Democratic Party and bring our country back from twelve years of trickle-down economics that exploded the deficit, hurt the middle class, and increased poverty. In 2016, we were seeking to build on eight years of progress. For a change-hungry electorate, it was a harder sell. More hopeful voters bought it; more pessimistic voters didn’t.

Another lesson from this election, and from the Trump phenomenon in particular, is that traditional Republican ideology is bankrupt. For decades, the big debates in American politics were about the size and role of government. Democrats argued for a more active federal government and a stronger social safety net, while Republicans argued for a smaller government, lower taxes, and fewer regulations. The country seemed fairly evenly divided, or perhaps tilted slightly to the center-right. Then Trump came along and pulled back the curtain on what was really going on. We learned that many Republican voters didn’t have any problem with big government, so long as it was big government for them. Perhaps this has always been true—you may recall the infamous sign at Tea Party rallies that read, with no hint of irony, “Keep Your Government Hands off My Medicare”—but Trump brought it out into the open. He promised to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, while abandoning free trade and getting tough on bankers, in direct contradiction of Republican orthodoxy. Instead of paying a price for it, he swept away all his more traditional GOP rivals. Once in office, Trump abandoned most of his populist promises and largely hewed to the party line. But that shouldn’t obscure the fact that many of his voters wanted to chuck the orthodoxy and preserve entitlements. The reality is that doctrinaire trickle-downers who control Congress wield enormous power without having any real constituency for their policies outside the Republican donor class. When Republicans were opposing Obama or attacking me, they could unite against a common enemy, but now that they’re in power and people actually expect them to deliver results, we’re seeing that there’s little holding the Republican Party together.

The implications of all this are potentially profound. If Trump can’t deliver for working families, Democrats have to, and be able to explain it. It may be hard for us to match his grandiose promises, because we still believe in arithmetic, but we can offer real results. We still believe in trade, but we’ve got to be clearer about how we’d be tougher on countries trying to take advantage of American workers, and how we’d provide more funding up front for people hurt by foreign competition. We still believe in immigration, but we have to make a better case that if done right it will help all working people.

Democrats should reevaluate a lot of our assumptions about which policies are politically viable. These trends make universal programs even more appealing than we previously thought. I mean programs like Social Security and Medicare, which benefit every American, as opposed to Medicaid, food stamps, and other initiatives targeted to the poor. Targeted programs may be more efficient and progressive, and that’s why during the primaries I criticized Bernie’s “free college for all” plan as providing wasteful taxpayer-funded giveaways to rich kids. But it’s precisely because they don’t benefit everyone that targeted programs are so easily stigmatized and demagogued. We’ve seen this with the Affordable Care Act. For years, it was attacked as a new subsidy for poor people of color. A lot of working-class whites didn’t think it benefited them at all, especially if they lived in states where Republican leaders refused to expand Medicaid. In white-majority states where Medicaid was expanded, such as Arkansas and Kentucky, the beneficiaries were overwhelmingly white working families. But many voted for Trump anyway, betting he would take health care away from “others” and let them keep theirs. It was only when many Americans realized that repealing the ACA would take away universal protections they had come to enjoy, especially regarding preexisting conditions, that the law became popular. Medicaid’s expansion has made it more popular, too.

The conclusion I reach from this is that Democrats should redouble our efforts to develop bold, creative ideas that offer broad-based benefits for the whole country.

Before I ran for President, I read a book called With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don’t Pay Enough, by Peter Barnes, which explored the idea of creating a new fund that would use revenue from shared national resources to pay a dividend to every citizen, much like how the Alaska Permanent Fund distributes the state’s oil royalties every year. Shared national resources include oil and gas extracted from public lands and the public airwaves used by broadcasters and mobile phone companies, but that gets you only so far. If you view the nation’s financial system as a shared resource, then you can start raising real money from things like a financial transactions tax. Same with the air we breathe and carbon pricing. Once you capitalize the fund, you can provide every American with a modest basic income every year. Besides cash in people’s pockets, it would also be a way of making every American feel more connected to our country and to one another—part of something bigger than ourselves.

I was fascinated by this idea, as was my husband, and we spent weeks working with our policy team to see if it could be viable enough to include in my campaign. We would call it “Alaska for America.” Unfortunately, we couldn’t make the numbers work. To provide a meaningful dividend each year to every citizen, you’d have to raise enormous sums of money, and that would either mean a lot of new taxes or cannibalizing other important programs. We decided it was exciting but not realistic, and left it on the shelf. That was the responsible decision. I wonder now whether we should have thrown caution to the wind and embraced “Alaska for America” as a long-term goal and figured out the details later.

Interestingly, some Republican elder statesmen such as former U.S. Treasury Secretaries James Baker and Hank Paulson recently proposed a nationwide carbon dividend program that would tax fossil fuel use and refund all the money directly to every American. They think it’s a reasonable conservative response to the problems of climate change and income inequality, and a good alternative to government regulation. Under such a plan, working families with small carbon footprints could end up with a big boost in their incomes. We looked at this for the campaign as well, but couldn’t make the math work without imposing new costs on upper-middle-class families, which I had pledged not to do. Still, it’s tantalizing. A conservative government in Sweden created a similar program in 1991, and within a decade, it had reduced greenhouse gas emissions and expanded the economy by 50 percent, because so many Swedes used their tax rebates to increase energy efficiency, thus creating new jobs, increasing productivity, and lowering their electric bills.

We need to be thinking outside the box because the challenges we face are only getting bigger and more complex. Climate change is one example. Another is the long-term effects of automation and artificial intelligence, both on employment and national security. Bear with me here, because I have a lot to say about this. Over the past few years, I’ve had a series of alarming conversations with leading technologists in Silicon Valley who warn that this could be the first great technological revolution that ends up displacing more jobs than it creates. The impact of trade on our manufacturing industry received a lot more attention during the campaign, but many economists say that advances in technology actually have displaced far more jobs than trade in recent decades.

For instance, between 1962 and 2005, about four hundred thousand steelworker jobs disappeared. Competition from steel made in China and other countries was part of the problem. But technological innovation and automation were the bigger culprits. They allowed manufacturers to produce the same amount of steel with fewer and fewer workers, at lower costs.

The same story has been replicated across many industries, and it isn’t slowing down anytime soon. The arrival of self-driving cars could displace millions of truckers and taxi drivers. Some economists estimate that automation could put a third of all American men aged twenty-five to fifty-four out of work by 2050. Even if we manage to create new industries and new categories of jobs to replace those we’ve lost, the speed and breadth of the changes we’re facing will be destabilizing for millions of people.

I’m not suggesting that we should try to stop the march of technology. That would cause more problems than it solves. But we do need to make sure it’s working more for us than against us. If we can figure that out, including how to talk about it in a way that Americans will understand and support, that will be both good policy and good politics.

There’s another angle to consider as well. Technologists like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Bill Gates, and physicists like Stephen Hawking have warned that artificial intelligence could one day pose an existential security threat. Musk has called it “the greatest risk we face as a civilization.” Think about it: Have you ever seen a movie where the machines start thinking for themselves that ends well? Every time I went out to Silicon Valley during the campaign, I came home more alarmed about this. My staff lived in fear that I’d start talking about “the rise of the robots” in some Iowa town hall. Maybe I should have. In any case, policy makers need to keep up with technology as it races ahead, instead of always playing catch-up.

Across the board, we should be unafraid to kick the tires on transformative ideas. Like taxing net worth instead of annual income, which would make our system fairer, reduce inequality, and provide the resources to make the major investments our country needs. Or a national service initiative much broader than anything we have now, perhaps even universal. We should totally reimagine our training and workforce development system so that employers and unions are true partners, and people who don’t go to college can find a good job and enjoy a middle-class life. We need to completely rethink how Americans receive benefits such as retirement and health care so that they’re universal, automatic, and portable. As you probably can tell by now, I love talking about this stuff. The point is, we have to think big and think different.

No matter what I do in the years ahead, I’ll be chasing down new policy ideas that I think could make a difference. Not every election will be so filled with venom, misinformation, resentments, and outside interference as this one was. Solutions are going to matter again in politics. Democrats must be ready when that day comes.

Making History

“I just want to show you this,” said David Muir, the young ABC News anchor, as he walked me to the window. “This is the crowd that’s waiting for you.”

It was late on Tuesday, June 7, 2016, the day of the final Democratic primaries. Muir and I were on the second floor of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, in a small room crowded with cameras, hot lights, and a TV crew making final arrangements for our interview. The window looked out onto a cavernous hangar that was packed with thousands of cheering people waving American flags and stomping their feet. In the middle stood an empty stage.

“Oh my gosh,” I said, clasping my hands to my heart. “Look at that!”

“It’s eight years ago to the day that you conceded. And tonight you will go out there for a very different reason,” Muir said.

I thought back to that painful day in 2008 when I stood in front of a much more somber crowd in the National Building Museum in Washington, and thanked my supporters for putting eighteen million cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling. Now here I was, closer than ever to shattering that ceiling once and for all.

“Is it sinking in?” he asked.

“This is sinking it in, I can tell you that,” I said, pointing to the crowd below. “It’s an overwhelming feeling, David, really.”

It had been a difficult week. Heck, it had been a difficult year. The primaries had gone on longer and been far more bruising than anyone expected. The delegate math hadn’t been in question since March, but Bernie had hung on to the bitter end, drawing blood wherever he could along the way. I somewhat understood why he did it; after all, I stayed in the race for as long as I could in 2008. But that race was much closer, and I endorsed Barack right after the last primary. On this day in New York, Bernie was still more than a month away from endorsing me.

I spent the previous days campaigning like crazy in California. Even if I had the nomination locked up, I wanted to win California. I wanted to close out the primaries with a burst of enthusiasm and head toward our convention in Philadelphia with the wind at my back. The polls looked good, but I was anxious. Too many times in this campaign I had felt like Charlie Brown with the football. There had been the squeaker in Iowa and surprise losses in Michigan and Indiana. This time I wasn’t going to leave anything to chance.

That Monday, I had raced all over Southern California, holding rallies, doing local TV and radio interviews, and trying to encourage as many of my supporters as possible to get out and vote. A little after 5:00 p.m., as we were driving to yet another rally at Long Beach City College, my phone started buzzing. The Associated Press had just sent out a breaking news alert. Its reporters had been canvassing superdelegates, the party leaders who join delegates selected in primaries and caucuses in choosing the nominee at the convention. According to the AP’s latest count, I had just hit the magic number of delegates needed to win. “Hillary Clinton Becomes the Democratic Party’s Presumptive Presidential Nominee,” it declared. I had to read it twice to believe it.

You might think this was good news. I’d won! But that’s not how I felt at all. I was focused entirely on the next day’s California primary, along with the contests in Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, New Jersey, and South Dakota. This news could very well depress turnout among my supporters. And I wanted to be able to walk out onstage Tuesday night and declare victory, not have it announced in an out-of-the-blue tweet from the Associated Press the day before. I told Huma and Greg Hale, an Arkansas farmer and event-production-and-visuals wizard whom I’ve known since he was four years old, that I imagined a sea of people waving small American flags as the backdrop, and they teased me about doing my own advance work. But I had been waiting for this moment for months, and I wanted it to be perfect.

We arrived at the college in Long Beach, and I went into a makeshift greenroom. It was part of a locker room and felt like a cage. I was annoyed and not sure what to say. What was the best way to acknowledge the news in my rally speech without making too big a deal of it? I wanted to just pretend it hadn’t happened, but that didn’t seem like a viable option. Nick, who with Huma was on the phone with the rest of the team in Brooklyn, suggested a formulation. “Why not say we’re on the brink of a historic moment?” That would have to do, I grumbled.

I also was unsatisfied with the draft for the victory speech I was supposed to deliver on Tuesday night. It didn’t feel right: too small, too political, not worthy of the moment. I felt the weight of expectations and history pressing down on me.

If the primaries were over, and I was the presumptive nominee, that meant I was now all that stood between Donald Trump and the White House. It would just be me and him, one-on-one, with stakes that couldn’t possibly be higher. Everyone would be counting on me. We absolutely had to win.

On top of all that, I was about to become the first woman ever nominated by a major party for President of the United States. That goal has been so elusive for so long. Now it was about to be real.

I’d been thinking about all the women who had marched, rallied, picketed, went to jail, and endured ridicule, harassment, and violence so that one day someone like me could come along and run for President. I thought about the brave women and men who gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 for the first great conference on women’s rights. Frederick Douglass, the African American social reformer and abolitionist, was there. He described his fellow participants as “few in numbers, moderate in resources, and very little known in the world. The most we had to connect us was a firm commitment that we were in the right and a firm faith that the right must ultimately prevail.”

Sixty-eight “ladies” and thirty-two “gentlemen” signed the Declaration of Sentiments, which asserted boldly, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and women are created equal.” All men and women. The backlash was fierce. The Seneca Falls 100 were called dangerous fanatics. They were also dismissed as batty old maids—I’m not sure how one can be both, but apparently these activists were. One newspaper declared, “These rights for women would bring a monstrous injury to all mankind.” But those brave suffragettes never lost faith.

What could I say on Tuesday night that would be worthy of that legacy and the hope that millions were now investing in me?

For a long time, the campaign had been trying to figure out the best way to talk about the historic nature of my candidacy. There were brainstorming sessions in Brooklyn, as well as polls and focus groups. Many of our core supporters were very excited by the idea of finally breaking the glass ceiling. Celebrating that could help keep people energized and motivated in the general election. But some younger women didn’t see what the big deal was. And many undecided women in battleground states didn’t want to hear about it at all. Some were afraid that by leaning into the fact that I was a woman, my campaign would end up turning away men—a disheartening but all-too-real possibility. So that wasn’t much help.

I was torn. I wanted to be judged on what I did, not on what I represented or what people projected onto me. But I understood how much this breakthrough would mean to the country, especially to girls and boys who would see that there are no limits on what women can achieve. I wanted to honor that significance. I just didn’t know the best way to do it.

I carried all that uncertainty with me back from California, all the way to David Muir’s interview room in the Brooklyn Navy Yard on Tuesday night. Results were starting to come in. I won the New Jersey primary. Bernie won the North Dakota caucus. The big prize, California, was still out there, but all signs pointed to another victory. Bill and I had worked hard on my speech, but I still felt unsettled. Maybe it was about not being ready to accept “yes” for an answer. I had worked so hard to get to this moment, and now that it had arrived, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself.

Then Muir walked me over to the window, and I looked out at that crowd—at thousands of people who’d worked their hearts out, resisted the negativity of a divisive primary and relentlessly harsh press coverage, and poured their dreams into my campaign. We’d had big crowds before, but this felt different. It was something more than the enthusiasm I saw on the trail. It was a pulsing energy, an outpouring of love and hope and joy. For a moment, I was overwhelmed—and then calm. This was right. I was ready.

After the interview, I went downstairs to where my husband was sitting with the speechwriters going over final tweaks to the draft. I read it over one more time and felt good. Just as they were racing off to load the speech into the teleprompter, I said I had one more thing to add: “I’m going to talk about Seneca Falls. Just put a placeholder in brackets and I’ll take care of it.”

I took a deep breath. I didn’t want the emotion of the moment to get to me in the middle of my speech. I said a little prayer and then headed for the stage. At the last moment, Huma grabbed my arm and whispered, “Don’t forget to take a minute to savor this.” It was good advice. The roar when I stepped out was deafening. I felt a surge of pride, gratitude, and pure happiness. I stood at the podium, my arms outstretched, taking it all in.

“Tonight’s victory is not about one person,” I said. “It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible.”

Like in my campaign launch speech on Roosevelt Island, I took the opportunity to talk about my mother. When I thought about the sweep of history, I thought about her. Her birthday had just passed a few days earlier. She was born on June 4, 1919—the exact same day that Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, finally granting women the right to vote.

“I really wish my mother could be here tonight,” I told the crowd in Brooklyn. I had practiced this part several times, and each time, I teared up. “I wish she could see what a wonderful mother Chelsea has become, and could meet our beautiful granddaughter, Charlotte.” I swallowed hard. “And, of course, I wish she could see her daughter become the Democratic Party’s nominee for President of the United States.”

A month and a half later, I was preparing to formally accept the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The Republicans had just finished their convention in Cleveland. Trump had given a dark and megalomaniacal speech in which he described a badly broken American and then declared, “I alone can fix it.” I wasn’t sure how voters were going to react to that, but I thought it went against America’s can-do spirit that says, “We’ll fix it together.” His speech, like his entire candidacy, was about stoking and manipulating people’s ugliest emotions. He wanted Americans to fear one another and the future.

Other Republicans did their best Trump imitations at the GOP convention. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a former prosecutor, led the crowd through a mock indictment of me for various supposed crimes. The crowd shouted its verdict: “Guilty!” The irony, apparently lost on Christie but nobody else, was that the investigation into my emails was over, but the investigation into the closing of the George Washington Bridge as an act of political retribution was ongoing and would eventually cause two of Christie’s allies to be sentenced to prison.

It was sad to watch the Republican Party go from Reagan’s “Morning in America” to Trump’s “Midnight in America.” The dystopian, disorganized mess in Cleveland got panned by the press and offered us the chance to provide a clear contrast when Democrats gathered in Philadelphia on July 25.

Bill, Chelsea, my senior team, and nearly every Democratic leader in the country were there. I wasn’t. The tradition is that the nominee does not arrive until the end. So I was home alone in Chappaqua, watching television and working on my acceptance speech. It was a little lonely, but I enjoyed the rare moment to myself after so many hectic months on the campaign trail.

Michelle Obama stole the show on the first night with her graceful, fiercely personal speech. Just as she had done for eight years, she represented our best selves as Americans and reminded us that “When they go low, we go high.” Senator Cory Booker, whom I had also considered as a potential Vice President, gave a rousing and heartfelt speech. Riffing off one of the most powerful lines from the Declaration of Independence, he urged Americans to follow the example of our Founders and “pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

On the second day, the convention got down to business with formal nominations and then a roll call vote by state. Since the outcome is rarely in doubt, this can be a somewhat tedious affair. But when you’re the one getting nominated, it feels like high drama.

In 2008, I had surprised the convention by appearing on the floor with the New York delegation in the middle of the roll call. I moved to suspend the vote and nominate Barack Obama by acclamation. Up at the podium, Nancy Pelosi asked if there was a second for my motion, and the whole arena roared its approval.

This time we expected a full roll call. When it was Illinois’s turn, my best friend from growing up, Betsy Ebeling, stepped to the microphone and announced ninety-eight votes for me. “On this historic, wonderful day, in honor of Dorothy and Hugh’s daughter and my sweet friend—I know you’re watching—this one’s for you, Hill.” Back in Chappaqua, I couldn’t stop smiling.

Slowly, state by state, the tallies grew, and I got closer and closer to a majority of delegates. Then, a little after 6:30 P.M., South Dakota put me over the top, and my supporters in the hall broke into sustained jubilation. There were still more states to go, so the roll call went on. Finally, we came to Vermont, which had asked to go last. Bernie came forward and, in an echo of eight years before, said, “I move that Hillary Clinton be selected as the nominee of the Democratic Party for President of the United States.” The place erupted.

The long primary was over. The final delegate count was 2,842 for me and 1,865 for Bernie. I know it couldn’t have been easy for him to make that statement on the floor, and I appreciated it.

That evening, the actor Elizabeth Banks emceed a joyful and moving series of testimonials from people who had gotten to know me over the years—people who let me into their lives, and became a part of mine.

There was Anastasia Somoza, whom I met when she was just nine years old. Anastasia was born with cerebral palsy, and became a passionate advocate for people with disabilities. She worked on my first campaign for Senate, interned in my office, and became a lifelong friend.

Jelani Freeman, another former intern in my Senate office, lived in six different foster homes between the ages of eight and eighteen. Many kids in that situation never graduate from high school. Jelani got a master’s degree and a law degree. He said that I encouraged him to persevere and rise as high as he could. The real story was that he was the one who encouraged me. His example inspired me to keep up my advocacy for children, especially kids in foster care.

Ryan Moore also spoke. When I first met him, Ryan was seven years old and wearing a full body brace that must have weighed forty pounds. He was born with a rare form of dwarfism that kept him in a wheelchair, but it didn’t dim his unbeatable smile and sense of humor. I met Ryan’s family at a health reform conference in 1994 and learned about their battles with the insurance company to pay for his costly surgeries and treatments. Their story—and Ryan’s tenacity—kept me going through all the ups and downs of our battle for health care reform.

Then there was Lauren Manning, who was gravely injured on 9/11. More than 82 percent of her body was badly burned, giving her a less than 20 percent chance of survival. But she fought her way back and reclaimed her life. Lauren and her husband, Greg, became vocal advocates on behalf of other 9/11 families. I did everything I could as a Senator to be a champion for them, as well as for the first responders who got sick from their time at Ground Zero.

I found it very moving to listen to these friends tell their stories, just as it had been to see Betsy during the roll call. It was like an episode of that old television program This Is Your Life. I was flooded with memories and pride in everything we’d accomplished together.

But none of that prepared me for what Bill had to say when it was his turn to speak.

He looked great up there at the podium, with his distinguished shock of white hair and dignified bearing. “Back where he belongs,” I thought. Four years before, he had masterfully laid out the case for reelecting Barack Obama. This time he left the economic statistics behind and spoke from the heart.

“In the spring of 1971, I met a girl,” he began. I knew right away that this was going to be different. In fact, I don’t think there’s ever been a major political speech like it. Bill talked about how we met and fell in love. “We’ve been walking and talking and laughing together ever since,” he said, “and we’ve done it in good times and bad, through joy and heartbreak.” He took the American people by the hand and walked them down the path of our lives together, with love, humor, and wisdom. He shared private little moments, like the day we dropped Chelsea off at college for the first time. “There I was in a trance just staring out the window trying not to cry,” Bill recalled, “and there was Hillary on her hands and knees desperately looking for one more drawer to put that liner paper in.”

Sitting by myself in the home we’d made together, surrounded by the mementos of our life and love, I felt like my heart was bursting. “I married my best friend,” Bill said. It was like hearing a love letter read out loud on national television.

As soon as the speech wrapped up, I jumped in our van and raced over to a country inn down the road, where a large group of friends and neighbors had gathered. I was positively beaming when I walked in. What a night!

A camera crew was waiting, ready to connect me directly to the arena in Philadelphia. An adorable six-year-old girl named Remie came over and gave me a hug. We were both wearing red, and I complemented her dress as she smiled bashfully. With Remie by my side, I was ready to speak to the convention and the country.

Onstage in Philadelphia, the giant video screen above the arena began flashing the pictures of every previous U.S. President, one white man after another, until finally Barack Obama. Then the screen appeared to shatter into a million pieces, and there I was, live from Crabtree’s Kittle House Restaurant and Inn in Chappaqua. On the convention floor, people held up red and blue placard signs that said, “History.”

I thanked the convention for the incredible honor they’d given me. “And if there are any little girls out there who stayed up late to watch,” I said, as the camera pulled back to show little Remie and our other friends crowded behind me, “let me just say, I may become the first woman President, but one of you is next.”

I hugged and thanked everyone I could find. I didn’t want to leave, didn’t want the night to end. Later, I heard that social media was buzzing with parents posting pictures of their daughters who had indeed stayed up late to watch, while others shared photos of mothers and grandmothers who hadn’t lived to see this day. A writer named Charles Finch tweeted, “There are days when you believe the arc of history thing.” That’s exactly how it felt: like all of us together were bending the arc of history just a little bit further toward justice.

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. Trump’s “I Alone Can Fix It” speech in Cleveland had provided the perfect foil. The history surrounding us in Philadelphia offered further inspiration. Independence Hall was just a few blocks from our hotel. It was there, 240 years before, that representatives from thirteen unruly colonies transformed themselves into a single, unified nation. It wasn’t easy. Some of the colonists wanted to stick with the King. Some wanted to stick it to the King and go their own way. They had different backgrounds, interests, and aspirations. Somehow they began listening to one another and compromising, and eventually found common purpose. They realized they’d be stronger together than they ever could be on their own.

On Thursday, the last day of the convention, Bill and I sat around the dining room table in our suite at the Logan Hotel, going over a draft of my speech, trying to get it just right. I tried not to think about how many millions of people would be watching and how enormous the stakes would be. Instead, I focused on trying to make my argument as clear and compelling as possible. If I did a good job, and the country saw me without all the usual nonsense getting in the way, the rest would take care of itself. Suddenly, with a squeal of delight, our granddaughter, Charlotte, burst into the room and ran over to us. I put down the draft and chased after her, finally scooping her up in my arms and giving her a kiss. Any tension I’d been feeling drained away in a flash. There was nowhere else in the world I wanted to be other than right there, holding my granddaughter.

After a few more hours of tweaking and practicing, I put on another suffragette-white pantsuit and got ready to head to the arena. The television was still on, and just before I walked out the door, I saw Khizr and Ghazala Khan come to the podium. I had first heard about the Khans the previous December, when an intern on my speechwriting team came across the story of their son, Humayun, a heroic captain in the U.S. military who was killed protecting his unit in Iraq. I talked about Captain Khan in a speech in Minneapolis about counterterrorism and the importance of working with American Muslims, not demonizing them. My team followed up with the family and invited them to share their experiences at the convention.

None of us were prepared for how powerful it would be. Mr. Khan solemnly offered to lend Donald Trump his copy of the Constitution that he kept in his pocket. It instantly became one of the most iconic moments of the whole election. Like millions of others, I was transfixed. Watching Mr. and Mrs. Khan up there, still grieving, incredibly dignified, patriotic to the core, filled me with a rush of pride and confidence in our party and our country.

Then I had to hurry to the arena. We had NPR on the whole way so I didn’t miss a minute.

I watched backstage as Chelsea gave a perfect introduction that brought me to tears.

“My parents raised me to know how lucky I was that I never had to worry about food on the table,” she said. “I never had to worry about a good school to go to. That I never had to worry about a safe neighborhood to play in. And they taught me to care about what happens in our world and to do whatever I could to change what frustrated me, what felt wrong. They taught me that’s the responsibility that comes with being smiled on by fate.”

“I know my kids are a little young,” she continued, “but I’m already trying to instill those same values in them.”

Chelsea finished her remarks and introduced a film about my life by Shonda Rhimes. I love how Shonda makes tough, smart female characters come alive on television, and I was hoping she could do the same for me. Boy, did she deliver. Her film was funny, poignant, just perfect. When it was over, Chelsea came back on and welcomed me—“my mother, my hero”—to the stage. There was a deafening roar.

Looking out into that arena full of cheers and banners and music, with thousands of excited people and millions more at home, was one of the proudest and most overwhelming moments of my life.

“Standing here as my mother’s daughter, and my daughter’s mother, I’m so happy this day has come,” I said. “Happy for grandmothers and little girls and everyone in between. Happy for boys and men, too—because when any barrier falls in America, for anyone, it clears the way for everyone. When there are no ceilings, the sky’s the limit.”

Even after everything that’s happened, I still believe that.

I still believe that, as I’ve said many times, advancing the rights and opportunities of women and girls is the unfinished business of the twenty-first century. That includes one day succeeding where I failed and electing a woman as President of the United States.

On November 8 and the days that followed, hundreds of women visited the grave of the great suffragette leader Susan B. Anthony in Rochester, New York. They covered her headstone with “I Voted” stickers. People did the same to the statue in Seneca Falls commemorating the spot by the river where Amelia Bloomer first introduced Anthony to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, sparking the partnership at the heart of the suffragette movement.

A lot of women shared stories like this one, which I received from a woman named Marcia in California:

In my concession speech, I said, “We have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but some day someone will—and hopefully sooner than we might think right now.” History is funny that way. Things that seem far off and impossible have a way of turning out to be nearer and more possible than we ever imagined.

Of the sixty-eight women who signed the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848, only one lived to see the Nineteenth Amendment ratified. Her name was Charlotte Woodward, and she thanked God for the progress she had witnessed in her lifetime.

In 1848, Charlotte was a nineteen-year-old glove maker living in the small town of Waterloo, New York. She would sit and sew for hours every day, working for meager wages with no hope of ever getting an education or owning property. Charlotte knew that if she married, she, any children she might have, and all her worldly possessions would belong to her husband. She would never be a full and equal citizen, never vote, certainly never run for office. One hot summer day, Charlotte heard about a women’s rights conference in a nearby town. She ran from house to house, sharing the news. Some of her friends were as excited as she was. Others were amused or dismissive. A few agreed to go with her to see it for themselves. They left early on the morning of July 19 in a wagon drawn by farm horses. At first, the road was empty, and they wondered if no one else was coming. At the next crossroads, there were wagons and carriages, and then more appeared, all headed to Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls. Charlotte and her friends joined the procession, heading toward a future they could only dream of.

Charlotte Woodward was more than ninety years old when she finally gained the right to vote, but she got there. My mother had just been born and lived long enough to vote for her daughter to be President.

I plan to live long enough to see a woman win.