Top 40 Jonathan Allen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Let us not grow weary in doing good,” she said, paraphrasing Galatians 6:9, “for in due season, we shall reap if we do not lose heart.”

— Jonathan Allen

2. “The campaign was an unholy mess, fraught with tangled lines of authority, petty jealousies, distorted priorities, and no sense of greater purpose. No one was in charge, and no one had figured out how to make the campaign about something bigger than Hillary. Muscatine felt that the speech said nothing because it tried to say too much.”

— Jonathan Allen

3. “There was a certain duality to Hillary’s vast political empire: while it was true that most of the voices inside and outside the campaign had something valuable to contribute, when taken together, they were cacophonous. Rarely did everyone agree on a particular course of action, and often the counsel Hillary got came with the baggage of the adviser’s agenda in maintaining good relations with the candidate or trying to make a rival look bad. Both.”

— Jonathan Allen

4. “Her approach, guided by Mook and informed by the demands of winning the primary, was to build a coalition focused on core strengths: African Americans, Latinos, college-educated whites, and women. But the more she catered to them, the more she pushed away other segments of the electorate.”

— Jonathan Allen

5. “Both archetypes were familiar in Clintonworld: the cold-eyed, self-serving strategists who build up themselves by building up one Clinton or both and the sycophants who prove their loyalty to a Clinton by devoting their entire lives to the family. Hillary wanted them to coexist. But.”

— Jonathan Allen

6. “Mook was already operating inside a framework first developed for Hillary by David Plouffe, President Barack Obama’s longtime strategist, who had put together a preliminary memo for Hillary in December 2013. As Obama’s campaign manager in 2008, Plouffe had despised Clinton; that he was now advising her was an important signal of just how completely she would co-opt the Democratic establishment even before she began running. Plouffe.”

— Jonathan Allen

7. “For Bernie, winning wasn’t the only thing. I’m a backbencher in Congress, he told Devine. I want to come out of this in a better position to push the issues I care about. He wanted a higher profile in the Senate if he ran and lost. “A presidential campaign, if done well, can accomplish that,” Devine replied.”

— Jonathan Allen

8. “She’d gone on the attack against a better-liked rival whose platform more closely mirrored the values of the party’s base, creating a boomerang effect on her personal standing. Perhaps.”

— Jonathan Allen

9. “Hillary didn’t have a vision to articulate. And no one else could give one to her. In fact, the more people she assigned to the task of setting the tone for her campaign, the more muddled her message becam.”

— Jonathan Allen

10. “Over the course of her life, no matter how good things got for her, she was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. When two-thirds of Americans had approved of her during her tenure as secretary of state, she’d known those numbers would plummet back to Earth once she became a candidate again.”

— Jonathan Allen

11. “She believed her campaign had failed her – not the other way around – and she wanted “to see who was talking to who, who was leaking to who,” said.”

— Jonathan Allen

12. “Though she was speaking with a small group made up mostly of intimates, she sounded like she was addressing a roomful of supporters – inhibited by the concern that whatever she said might be leaked to the press.”

— Jonathan Allen

13. “The one person with whom she didn’t seem particularly upset: herself. No one who drew a salary from the campaign would tell her that. It was a self-signed death warrant to raise a question about Hillary’s competence – to her or anyone else – in loyalty-obsessed Clintonworld.”

— Jonathan Allen

14. “Hillary – who had been the target of so much venom over the years and who had become a disciple of Obama’s data-driven campaign style – sided with a younger generation that heavily favored science over the art of politics.”

— Jonathan Allen

15. “If Hillary was a candidate often isolated from her formal campaign – and she was – Abedin was the croc-filled moat encircling her. The.”

— Jonathan Allen

16. “Bill believed the push for Brexit – and its eventual approval by voters – showed a strong contempt for existing power structures that reflected the mood of the American electorate. You guys are underestimating the significance of Brexit, he told Brooklyn and his own advisers over and over.”

— Jonathan Allen

17. “Between the Benghazi Committee, which would take depositions from Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, and Jake Sullivan among other Hillary aides, the drip-drip nature of evolving federal lawsuits, and judicial orders for the State Department to release Hillary’s e-mails on a rolling basis, the early months of the campaign became a private and public hell. It was only a matter of time before voters would know that Hillary had not told the truth about not sending or receiving classified information.”

— Jonathan Allen

18. “And she didn’t want the first major address of what could be a history-making campaign to be set against a minimalistic backdrop like some farmer’s back porch.”

— Jonathan Allen

19. “Much of this infighting might have been avoided had someone been given the authority to have the final say on matters large and small. But Hillary distributed power so broadly that none of her aides or advisers had control of the whole apparatus.”

— Jonathan Allen

20. “Hillary spoke of Dorothy Rodham, age eight, sitting on a train with her little sister on their way to live with family who didn’t want them. “I dream of going up to her and sitting next to her and taking her in my arms,” Hillary said, and telling her, “as hard as it might be to imagine, your daughter will grow up to be a United States Senator, represent our country as Secretary of State and win more than 62 million votes for president of the United States.”

— Jonathan Allen

21. “Hillary began to home in on one line of inquiry. Do I have to build a big national footprint or can I rely on the Democratic National Committee, state parties, and outside groups to shoulder some of the burden?”

— Jonathan Allen

22. “Make America Great Again” – ripped off from Ronald Reagan, and traced the decline of the country to the mid-1960s. Though he didn’t mention the Johnson era’s Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, or public subsidies for housing and health care, Trump’s dog whistle was just the right pitch to attract the support of white supremacists and nearly all-white crowds of thousands at his campaign rallies.”

— Jonathan Allen

23. “Nor was anyone empowered to both enforce Hillary’s will and tell her when she was wrong without fear of reprisal.”

— Jonathan Allen

24. “Throughout the primary, he’d report back from the field on what he was hearing at campaign events and from friends across the country. Mook’s response was always a variation on the same analysis: the data run counter to your anecdotes.”

— Jonathan Allen

25. “Hillary was fighting the last war. She did that with varying degrees of success. But the variable she couldn’t change was the candidate.”

— Jonathan Allen

26. “Biden was for the Iraq War before he was against it. And he was the Senate sponsor of the Clinton White House anticrime law that had led to the mass incarceration of young black men. In addition, he’d ushered Clarence Thomas onto the Supreme Court, spent the early part of his career in the Senate trying to end school busing, and represented perhaps the most business-friendly tax haven in the nation, Delaware, for thirty-six years.”

— Jonathan Allen

27. “But the idea burned into her mind as much as anything else was that she had lost because she’d hired people who put their own interests above getting her elected. The.”

— Jonathan Allen

28. “Trump had tapped into a vein in the electorate that Hillary couldn’t locate – and, just as important, that his much narrower focus within the Electoral College provided a viable path to victory.”

— Jonathan Allen

29. “After the 2008 campaign, two of her aides, Kris Balderston and Adrienne Elrod, had toiled to assign loyalty scores to members of Congress, ranging from one for the most loyal to seven for those who had committed the most egregious acts of treachery. Bill Clinton had campaigned against some of the sevens in subsequent primary elections, helping to knock them out of office. The fear of retribution was not lost on the remaining sevens, some of whom rushed to endorse Hillary early in the 2016 cycle.”

— Jonathan Allen

30. “After years of watching adversaries comb through her public records for any hint of a scandal, and after accessing her own aides’ e-mails, Hillary well understood the danger of exposing her own private thoughts to scrutiny. And that was reason enough to want them shielded from political enemies, journalists, and the public.”

— Jonathan Allen

31. “As she had at State, Abedin concerned herself with elements of the operation for which she had no credentials. But.”

— Jonathan Allen

32. “Hillary’s campaign was so spirit-crushing that her aides eventually shorthanded the feeling of impending doom with a simple mantra: We’re not allowed to have nice things.”

— Jonathan Allen

33. “Ultimately, it was a battle between those who believed that it was folly to think Hillary could show up in lower-population areas and change hearts and minds and those who believed, just as firmly, that politics and Hillary’s path to victory were fundamentally about doing just that. That elemental split hung over nearly every internal skirmish over strategy and tactics – from.”

— Jonathan Allen

34. “For Biden, as for other Democrats who had considered running in 2016, Hillary’s ability to co-opt the major institutions, political leaders, operatives, and financiers of the Democratic Party was deeply frustrating.”

— Jonathan Allen

35. “In the summer of 2008, years before her private e-mail server became a campaign issue, Hillary learned about the power of digital snooping. At the time, she was conducting an autopsy of her failed bid against Barack Obama, and she wanted an honest accounting of what had gone wrong. So she instructed a trusted aide to access the campaign’s server and download the messages sent and received by top staffers.”

— Jonathan Allen

36. “Eleven stories above Brooklyn Heights in a 659,000-square-foot building that also housed Morgan Stanley and the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, Hillary’s top aides were as miserable as midlevel bureaucrats in an agency with no clear plans for how to attain its mission. They.”

— Jonathan Allen

37. “For both sides, Hillary was the perfect symbol of everything wrong with America. At times, Trump and Sanders would act as the right and left speakers on a stereo blaring a chorus on repeat: Hillary’s a corrupt insider who has helped rig the political and economic systems in favor of the powerful.”

— Jonathan Allen

38. “Bernie really didn’t make any effort to explain realistic scenarios in which his agenda could be enacted. Obama worried about the costs of his proposals and their real-world impact.”

— Jonathan Allen

39. “The candidate would blame her staff for failing to contain the damage, and, privately, they would fault her for failing to take the steps necessary to do that.”

— Jonathan Allen

40. “Over the course of a couple of hours, they hammered out remarks aimed at comforting Americans who feared a Trump presidency. They went heavy on themes of constitutional protections and mentioned Muslim Americans and women and others who might feel targeted by the new president. The thrust, one Hillary adviser said, was “We stand with them and we see them, and the fact that we lost this election doesn’t mean that we’re going to stop fighting for them.”

— Jonathan Allen

41. “The more she became a candidate of minority voters, the less affinity whites had for her – particularly those whites who had little or no allegiance to the Democratic Party.”

— Jonathan Allen

42. “The group’s lists had value, and lawyers for Ready for Hillary and the Clinton campaign would spend weeks planning how they could legally transfer all the data from the super PAC to the campaign. In.”

— Jonathan Allen

43. “Clinton’s aides didn’t know that batches of Podesta’s e-mails would be released day after day from October 7 until November 7, the last day before the election. Nor could they have imagined that the intelligence finding of Russian interference in the election would so quickly get drowned out by the combination of the Trump Access Hollywood video and the Podesta e-mails.”

— Jonathan Allen

44. “If something does not directly differentiate you from your competition and drive business value creation, see if there is an AWS building block that can take care of it for you. There probably is. Then use that building block instead of wasting your time and effort recreating something that is a utility.”

— Jonathan Allen