Readers may be aware that since her loss in the election of 2016, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has had a series of high-profile speaking engagements and interviews, during which she’s taken opportunities to blame any number of people and factors for her embarrassing electoral rout.
On June 1, Clinton spoke at the venue where she was supposed to have given her concession speech on Election Night — the Jacob Javits Center in New York City. But that fateful night, Clinton never appeared. Instead, she sent her campaign chairman John Podesta to deliver the bad news to her waiting supporters, who were crushed by the candidate’s poor showing against Republican Donald Trump.
In her recent talk at the venue, for the 2017 BookExpo, Clinton was promoting a new tome she’ll be releasing in September about the election, which still lacks a title (and probably real substance). Clinton went off about hindsight and “taking herself out of the equation.” “It’s not about what happened to [me],” stated Clinton. “It’s about what happened to us.”
Clinton went on to blame the nation’s poor attention span, the Russians and various “challenges” for her loss. “You just get up every day and do the best you can… This book is, for me, a really personal, deep experience, and I also have to say an emotional catharsis,” she grumbled.
On May 31, Clinton spoke at a computer conference called Code 2017, sponsored by website Recode (which is owned by Vox Media) and hosted by journalists Walter Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Clinton’s unpaid appearance at the tech event seemed the perfect moment to enumerate a long list of excuses for her poor electoral showing. In fact, Clinton appeared to be very upfront about that. “I take responsibility for every decision I make, but that’s not why I lost,” she stated early on.
Instead, Clinton was quick to assign blame for her loss to former FBI Director James Comey. Comey had previously seemingly exonerated Clinton for her email server scandal in July of last year, but on October 28 announced that he had reopened his investigation based on new evidence that had come to light on a laptop belonging to former Congressman (and then-husband of Clinton personal assistant Huma Abedin) Anthony Weiner.
“As I explain in my book, you know, the Comey letter, which was, now we know, partly based on a false memo from the Russians. It was a classic piece of Russian disinformation. So, for whatever reason, and I speculate, but I can’t look inside the guy’s mind, you know, he dumps that on me October 28th, and I immediately start falling,” cited Clinton.
She also seemed to believe that she was singled out for being a woman in negative press stories about her extremely large payments for speeches to Wall Street banks. “Men got paid for the speeches they made, and I got paid for the speeches I made. It was used; I thought it was unfairly used, and all of that, but it was part of the background music… I never said I was a perfect candidate, and I certainly have never said I ran perfect campaigns, but I don’t know who is or did. And at some point it sort of bleeds into misogyny.” Of course, this sort of loser talk coming from either an athlete or a sports team would be judged to be completely unacceptable. But from Clinton, it’s standard operating procedure.
Clinton also piled on the press. “[That] was really interesting, since the mainstream media covered [my email scandal], as I say like Pearl Harbor, front pages everywhere, huge type…” Perhaps the media should have taken care to put articles about the Democratic frontrunner in smaller type than those about her Republican challenger? Clinton then referred to her email scandal as a “nothing burger.”
Bizarrely, she even tried to assign blame for her loss to her party, accusing it (despite her own acting as a Democratic fundraiser) of lacking the necessary capital to support her candidacy. “[The Democratic National Committee (DNC)] was on the verge of insolvency. Its data was mediocre to poor — nonexistent, wrong. I had to inject money into it — the DNC — to keep it going,” she whined.
Of course, there was no explanation of why, with a billion dollars at her disposal, she needed her party to perform tasks that her campaign could have done itself. It’s worth noting that former DNC Director of Data Andrew Therriault tweeted that these excuses by Clinton were “f***ing bulls***” just moments after she made them. “I’m not willing to let my people be thrown under the bus without a fight,” he wrote. “Our [data] models were never even close to being safe. [Clinton’s] team thought they knew better.”
Clinton then turned to the Russians, Twitter and Facebook. “We see now this new information about Trump’s Twitter account being populated by millions of bots… If you look at Facebook, the vast majority of the news items posted were fake. They were connected to, as we now know, the 1,000 Russian agents who were involved in delivering those messages… Putin wants to bring us down. And he is an old KGB agent. I had, obviously, run-ins with him, because that in large measure prompted his animus toward me, and his desire to help Trump.”
Voting methods and donor money also shared some of Clinton’s blame. “You had effective suppression of votes. Those of us who can, remember the Voting Rights Act, the expansion of the franchise, and then I was in the Senate when we voted 98 to nothing under a Republican president, George W. Bush, to extend the Voting Rights Act. And the Supreme Court said, ‘Oh, we don’t need it anymore,’ throws it out, and Republican governors and legislatures began doing everything they could to suppress the vote… You had Citizens United come to its full fruition. So unaccountable money was flowing in against me, against other Democrats, in a way that we hadn’t seen and then got attached to this weaponized information war.”
Of course, conveniently left out of that explanation was that Democrats have been caught on camera boasting about busing out-of-state citizens to voting stations. There was also far more unaccounted money on the Democratic side of the election than the Republican side.
Lastly, Clinton tried to rope Netflix into the blame game. “Go to Netflix, and say you want to see a political documentary. Eight of the top 10 [results] — last time I checked a few weeks ago — were screeds against President Obama or me, or both of us,” she railed.
In a New York magazine profile, in which she closely resembles the wife of a Communist Chinese leader in photos, Clinton is described as “furious,” “worried” and “resigned.” The magazine notes that Hillary “is reemerging, giving speeches and interviews. It’s clear that she’s making an active choice to remain a public figure.”
In the article, Clinton is quick to remind the writer that she won the popular vote against Trump and also beat her primary challenger Bernie Sanders (of course, without her superdelegates, she would surely have lost to him). This is despite the magazine’s interviewer pointedly asking Clinton how Trump and Sanders both managed to tap into voter anger, while she did not, a question Clinton simply bypassed.
Clinton also slammed whistleblower organization WikiLeaks, calling the emails it released “innocuous,” “boring” and “inconsequential.” “Each one was played out like it was some breathless flash. And so you got Trump, in the last month of the campaign, talking about WikiLeaks something like 164 times,” remarked Clinton, attempting to sound only slightly perturbed by the site’s disclosures while referencing the precise number of times Trump mentioned the leaks. “You’ve got all [Trump’s] minions out there; you’ve got the right-wing media just blowing it up. You’ve got Google searches off the charts.”
The failed candidate went on to add Steve Bannon, Bernie Sanders, suburban women, alt-right websites, bad polling, fake news, the hacker Guccifer, Trump supporters and ‘content farms in Macedonia’ to her long list of culprits, again avoiding taking personal responsibility for the election results.
Some pundits have suggested that all these recent media appearances are evidence that Clinton intends to run for president again in 2020. He says that she’s preparing the ground for her campaign by first trying to explain away her 2016 loss so she can move on to her selling points for 2020. But given the enormously negative feedback to her recent words, it’s highly questionable if Clinton has a true political future.
Like a boxer using a strategy of feints, the Democratic Party may simply be pulling Clinton out of their toolbox now to try to draw attention away from former Vice President Joe Biden, who also appears to be signaling a possible 2020 run.
By keeping voters guessing up until 2019 who the real candidate will be, the Democrats could take some of the heat off Biden or any other figure they might consider throwing into the race. Sad as it is to say, we may have to resign ourselves to hearing and seeing Clinton more in public until then.
