I enjoyed Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes' Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign fine; as far as quickie campaign books go, it's perfectly acceptable. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking in it, no huge reveal, but it's nice to have a straightforward, real-time narrative of what was going wrong inside Hillary Clinton's vaunted electoral apparatus.
One thing that rang wrong—or, perhaps more fairly, read as incomplete—was Allen and Parnes' description of one of the sub-scandals that emanated from the larger Podesta email dump that dominated the last month or so of the campaign. You may remember chatter about anti-Catholic sentiment toward the end of the election; here's how Shattered characterizes that particular kerfuffle:
And, in a message with the dismissive air of Hillary’s "deplorables" remark, communications director Jennifer Palmieri had noted to Podesta in 2011— before they worked for Hillary— that she wasn’t impressed with elite Catholic Republicans. "I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals," she wrote. Palmieri and Podesta are both Catholic, but the message read as a stab at Republicans who chose Catholicism and all evangelical Christians.
This is ... incomplete. So much so that I had kind of forgotten about the idea that Clinton staffers would joke about religious conversions as social signaling, to be totally honest. I remember Catholics in my circle being far, far more upset about the "Catholic Spring" discussion John Podesta had engaged in long before the election even began. As a refresher, here's an October story on that angle of the controversy:
Another email that was released appears to suggest that Clinton’s campaign set up Catholic groups to organize on issues such as contraception. Sandy Newman, president of Voices for Progress, wrote in an 2011 email to Podesta that there needs to be "a Catholic Spring," referring to the "Arab Spring," a wave of demonstrations and protests in the Arab world.
"There needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic church," Newman wrote.
"Is contraceptive coverage [in health care] an issue around which that could happen," he asked.
So, look, here's the real issue, at least as I (and my religiously minded friends) saw it at the time: here was someone with immense power in the forthcoming administration kind of idly chatting about the ways in which the Catholic Church could be pressured to amend sacred doctrine to benefit liberal policies and politicians. I mean, look, as an agnostic it's no skin off my nose, really; but if I were the type to be religious and I'd seen over the last few years the ways in which the power of the federal government could be used to go after those who oppose liberal policy priorities such as gay marriage, I'd be pretty freaked out over discussions that Catholics needed an "Arab Spring"-style reformation.
Which is to say: It's not so much the implicit disrespect of a "deplorables-style" comment that Catholics were annoyed by—it was fear over what Hillary and her acolytes would do to Catholic hospitals that did not want to perform abortions or Catholic churches that did not want to perform gay marriages. It's a fear that, I think, was not entirely unwarranted.