Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American

politics and the Trump presidency in 2017. I'm Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Editor of the Spectator.

I'm joined today by David Weigel, who is a national political correspondent at the Washington Post, and we're going

to be talking about Hillary Clinton and her new book. David, before I went out to America to start

working for a magazine called The American Conservative, this was around 2008, you wrote a cover

piece, I think it was, called The Waning Power of Hillary Hate.

And it was a brilliant piece, and I was really struck by it.

But over the course of the year, I had quite a lot of phone calls from American conservative readers

ringing up to insist that they still did hate Hillary Clinton quite strongly.

I just thought I'd ask you now, Clinton's books come out,

she's had quite a lot of

publicity this week, and she's obviously now a defeated figure in many ways, and she says she's not

going to be a candidate anymore. Where are we on the America hate, Hillary hate, gauge?

Well, let me see if I can navigate that without falling into the weeds. I think one of my arguments

at that point was that conservatives in D.C. remained convinced

that she was going to be the presidential nominee in 2008 and that Obama was interesting, but

couldn't break the power of the Clinton machine.

There was this fear that proved, I think, as we all saw, pretty ill-placed in the power of the Clinton machine to do everything uptakes when, including and especially the murder of its enemies.

And so I was arguing and saying, don't count on that.

It's really after, and this is after seven years of George W. Bush ending in complete disgrace, basically. Don't count on that being

enough to carry out. I think that my general theory, there are a million ways to analyze the defeat

of Hillary Clinton, just like there are a million things that go wrong when a space shuttle explodes.

...