The last thing Democrats need, on the cusp of an historically crucial election, is Hillary Clinton stewing in public about the last election.
It’s great that she has been cleared – twice – by the Trump regime’s investigators, as I’ve duly noted. But just because she was victimized by bogus probes, it doesn’t mean she warrants a halo. Truth is, she was a mediocre candidate in 2016, and she’s a meddlesome ex-candidate now.
In an interview the other day with The Hollywood Reporter, while flacking a new Hulu documentary about herself, she indulged her long-festering peeves about Bernie Sanders and peed on party unity. At a time when subsuming grievances for the greater good should take precedence – because nothing is more important than ousting Trump – Hillary’s priority is Hillary.
Her impulse is to stick around and trash Bernie: “Nobody likes him. Nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done (in the House or Senate). He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.” And when asked whether she’d endorse or campaign for Bernie if he were to win the ’20 nomination, she replied: “I’m not going to go there yet.”
I have no love for Bernie. He did damage in 2016, especially when he called Hillary “unqualified” to be president, his Bros failed to embrace Hillary for the greater good, and his current attack on Joe Biden’s Social Security record is studded with lies. But wouldn’t Bernie be better than four more years of an unhinged authoritarian? Hillary refused to say.
She seemed to insinuate that Bernie was the cause of her downfall, that he fatally sabotaged party unity. That appears to be the root cause of her resentment. But blaming Bernie is bogus. She lost for a slew of reasons, many of which could be traced to her hubris and tone-deaf political instincts.
Yes, the email flap was overblown. But she weaponized it for her foes in the first place. Shortly before she formally launched her ’16 candidacy, her decision as Secretary of State to use a private server – in her words, for “convenience” – defied the Federal Records Act, which requires that all top feds use government email accounts. Then, after she got busted for the practice, she insisted, via circumlocution and deceptive wordplay, that she’d never emailed any classified material. In fact, she had. Jim Comey’s various intrusions during the final days of this campaign – sowing baseless suspicions by reopening the email case, then absolving the baseless suspicions – certainly didn’t help her. But the original sin was hers.
Fairly or not, millions of potential anti-Trump voters opted to stay home in part because her handling of the email issue was perceived as the behavior of a deceptive Washingtonian who personified the dreaded status quo. And her decision to give well-paid speeches to Goldman Sachs…what was she thinking? Granted, the transcripts were mostly boilerplate, but it boggles the mind why a Democrat planning to run for president would not understand that her behavior would be viewed as arrogant. Especially at a time when so many working-stiff voters were ticked off at Wall Street and hostile to the trade deals – most notably NAFTA – that her husband had championed.
And this telling episode had nothing to do with Bernie:
Mrs. Clinton’s campaign tested out 84 slogans. There was “She’s Got Your Back,” “Strength You Can Count On” and “Real Fairness, Real Solutions.”
“Do we have any sense from her what she believes or wants her core message to be?” Joel Benenson, the campaign’s chief strategist and pollster, asked the chairman of her campaign, John D. Podesta, ahead of a New Hampshire speech, according to a hacked email that was among the thousands released by WikiLeaks.
That highlighted a problem that had dogged Hillary all the way back to the ’08 primaries: An inability to craft a core rationale for her candidacy. And lacking a resonant message, she remained vulnerable to the widely held perception (flogged by Trump) that she was merely an entitled establishment insider. The result, on election day, was that she underperformed. She won fewer votes than Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. She failed to turn out minorities in sufficient numbers (against a racist opponent, no less). She failed to turn out women in sufficient numbers. (She won only 45 percent of white women – against a vocal misogynist, no less.) She failed to turn out Millennials in sufficient numbers. She crashed with the working-class Rustbelt whites who’d buoyed Obama’s numbers.
So my message for Hillary is simple: Enough already with your Bernie beef. Let it go – or just go away. And thank you for your service.