Donald Trump probably pulled off one of the most stunning upsets in modern American political history in 2016. You all know this story: Hillary Clinton wasn’t likable, core voter blocs in the Obama coalition wouldn’t support her, and she didn’t have her husband's political skills. There were other issues, but these three are already election killers. The negligence in reaching out to rural white working-class voters was also another glaring and fatal misstep of this operation.
In his new book, the former president did not hold back on his wife’s inept campaign operation and their disastrous handling of the messaging during the election, saying this crew was incapable of selling “p—y on a troop train” (via NY Post):
Former President Bill Clinton privately criticized his wife Hillary’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, complaining to a friend that it couldn’t “sell p—y on a troop train,” according to a new book.
The 42nd president’s complaint was specifically aimed at the Hillary Clinton campaign’s heavy use of identity politics – attempting to paint Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) policies as sexist and racist in op-eds ghost-written by advocacy groups – as the former secretary of state battled the socialist lawmaker for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“To the extent that the campaign tactic moved the needle at all, it likely pushed moderate voters paying only marginal attention to the campaign towards Sanders, who spoke like a normal person while Clinton began ascending into what her ally James Carville would later call, ‘faculty lounge speak,’” journalist Ryan Grim writes in “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution,” which was released last week.
“Former President Bill Clinton, surveying the landscape and the ham-handed efforts at identity politics was bereft, lamenting to a longtime friend in the fall of 2016 that Hillary’s campaign ‘could not sell p—y on a troop train,’” Grim writes.
Love him or hate him, Bill is right, though others, like Carville, have been making the same points about Democrats becoming too academic, cold, and distant for voters. The identity politics nonsense isn’t new, along with boneheaded policies like college tuition debt relief, which isn’t a sellable proposition for most American voters. It’s a policy that’s guaranteed to create factories for Trump-like candidates. For those wondering how populism made a comeback in 2016—that policy is one of the reasons why.
But Slick Willy’s observation of his wife’s communications strategy and efforts couldn’t be more accurate.
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