Years ago, when Jon Stewart held his “Rally to Restore Sanity” — based on the “post-partisan” premise that what ails America is the inability of “both sides” to put aside their differences and come together in compromise — Bill Maher (of all people) made a good point. “If you’re going to have a rally where hundreds of thousands of people show up, you might as well go ahead and make it about something,” he said.

Reading over Shattered, the dread-inducing, behind-the scenes account of Hillary Clinton’s disastrous presidential campaign written by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, you realize that the same wisdom applies just as well to a presidential campaign. If you’re going to have a campaign that will mobilize millions of voters, you might as well go ahead and make it about something.

In an election as strange as 2016’s, there are any number of factors one could point to as to why Clinton lost the election, all of which Clinton herself and her backers will be happy to tell you about. There’s James Comey and the FBI, Russia, sexism, Bernie Sanders, the Left, Jill Stein, her own campaign team, as well as numerous others.