Obama famously said that no one was more qualified to be President than Hillary Clinton. Ironically, that probably worked against her. Because being extremely qualified for the Presidency (in the sense that anyone can be for a job of that magnitude) has, ironically, seemed to disqualify candidates from the Presidency in the hearts and minds of voters. When given a choice between a job candidate who would show up sober and razor-sharp, in an expensive suit, on time or earlier, or a dude who’d show up an hour late clearly high in jeans and a dirty tee-shirt, we have consistently gone with the stoned, dirty tee-shirt guy.

That was President George W. Bush, who somehow managed to maintain a persona as a party animal Texas good old boy despite being the sober son of a Yalie Connecticut Vice President and President who also ran the CIA at one point. John McCain and John Kerry were, despite what Donald “I Had Too Many Boo-Boos on My Foot To Fight In The War But Fought The War Instead Against Venereal Disease While Fucking the Debutante Class of 1969” Trump might tell you, war heroes who served for decades in Congress and maintained high national profiles and positions of prestige. They were beaten by a sexy community organizer barely into his forties and a fake-hillbilly Alfred E. Newman lookalike, respectively. I love Obama, but he was elected because he was exciting and new, not because he was better qualified to be President than John McCain.

Or think of Jimmy Carter. Motherfucker was a nuclear scientist (in addition to being a peanut farmer, Georgia governor and Billy’s brother) and he was defeated for re-election (usually a gimme in Presidential politics, unless we’re really annoyed by some nerdy egghead like Carter or H.W) by a grinning goon who starred with a monkey in a movie called Bedtime For Bonzo.

Like Carter, Al Gore was intimidatingly smart in a way that, honestly, a lot of the American public didn’t like. Gore in particular came off as everybody’s scowling, condescending manager while Bush seemed like the kind of guy who would buy 15 year olds beer even though he was pushing thirty. Sure, Gore might save the world with his campaign against global warming, but he seems a little condescending, so of course he couldn't be President.

In his re-election bid, Bill Clinton ran against an even more over-qualified candidate in Bob Dole who was even older and even more of a war hero than H.W was. Dole had been waiting patiently for his chance to run as the Republican candidate for President since shortly after the Republic was founded. His first Presidential run exploratory committee actually formed in 1798.

In that respect, being the vulgar, belligerent, inexperienced underdog actually worked in Trump’s favor. Americans don’t like to be told what to do or think, even if it’s their consciences begging them not to empower a deranged, xenophobic, staggeringly ill-prepared madman.

Shattered certainly acknowledges that Russia, misogyny and particularly Comey’s pre-election surprise all played a role in Clinton’s defeat. Yet the book and its authors place the blame for Trump's win unmistakably at Clinton’s feet, and, to a lesser extent, at the feet of her campaign manager Robby Mook, whose analytics-based approached to campaigning looked good on paper but led to the most shocking loss in recent political history.

To put things in Stuart Smalley terms, Hillary Clinton was good enough and smart enough, but doggone it, people just didn’t like her. No matter how ferociously she tried to change the publics’s perception of her as cold and distant, corrupt and compromised, ambitious and sometimes ruthless, Shattered suggests that it was just too ingrained, particularly with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump out passionately reinforcing the public conception of Clinton as the cold-blooded, power-obsessed Lady MacBeth of American Presidential politics.