Hillary Clinton is out of the woods—and frankly, I would just wish she would stay in whatever imaginary hut she built for herself to nurse her mental wounds from her stinging defeat to Donald Trump last year and stay there. But you can’t always get what you want. The former first lady and two-time presidential loser spoke with The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof about the four reasons that sunk her presidential bid. If you thought she would be introspective, think again. This is Hillary Clinton speaking—it was everyone else’s fault that she lost. Like Russia, FBI Director James Comey, the DNC email hacks, and, you guessed it, misogyny.
She largely cited these factors for her defeat:- Russia. "A foreign power meddled with our election," she said, labeling it "an act of aggression." She called for an independent, bipartisan investigation into the Kremlin's involvement and said the probe should examine whether there was collusion with the Trump campaign.
- Misogyny. "Certainly, misogyny played a role. That has to be admitted," she said. Clinton added that "some people — women included — had real problems" with the idea of a woman president.
- Comey. Clinton cited as damaging to her campaign his unusual decision to release of a letter on October 28, less than two weeks before Election Day, that said he was looking at additional emails related to the FBI probe of the former secretary of state's use of a private server.
- WikiLeaks. Weeks of disclosures of stolen emails from the personal account of then-Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, were particularly harmful, Clinton said, adding that it "played a much bigger role than I think many people yet understand."
She said the combination of Comey's actions and the WikiLeaks' revelations "had the determinative effect."
About her own role, she said, "There were things I could have done better."
What effect? Confirming that your allies knew your unauthorized and unsecure homebrew server that you used for official State Department business that has scores of classified material running through it would be, well—a problem. That’s one of the many things Podesta’s email trove unearthed, along with Donna Brazile, who was then a CNN commentator and the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, passing along debate questions to Clinton’s team during the primaries. The FBI angle of this story wouldn’t have been even a factor if you followed the 2009 regulations by the National Archives and Records Administration that specifically said that all electronic communication need to be preserved for the public record. Clinton said this server was allowed, it wasn’t. She said it was approved by the State Department, it wasn’t. And State said that if she had asked if she could use a homebrew server, they would have rejected the proposal. As for misogyny, that’s the main course for the progressive Left. When the Left gets beat, it was because of racism, misogyny, or some sort of imaginary privilege that exists in the minds of warped social justice warriors.
Hillary you lost. Get over it. And way to vote shame scores of women who simply didn’t like or trust you. That’s not misogyny—that’s you being a piss-poor salesperson. Fifty-two percent of white women voted for Trump; sixty-two percent of working class white women voted for Trump. The president got 42 percent of the women’s vote overall. Not terrible, but something that could be improved upon. Clinton was just a bad candidate, who couldn’t sell it. On top of that, Clinton didn’t really focus on the economy; she didn’t offer a picture of the way forward; and she didn’t empathize or try to understand the pain of America’s rural voters.
Instead, you called them deplorable, confident that the urban-base turnout for you would beat any Republican coalition. I mean Democrats had back-to-back victories with Obama. Yeah—Clinton isn’t Obama. She’s a terrible campaigner whose popularity sank the more she talked. This fiasco with the emails was made more of a total disaster when every explanation for the server was exposed to be a lie. It rehashed the old criticisms of Clinton (secretive, politics all the times, etc.), and then brought back memories. In all, the email kerfuffle that plagued her campaign to the very end torpedoed her on character issues was entirely her fault. As for Podesta, well, if his IT staffer didn’t have a typo in his email, then there may not have been such a breach.
What abut Comey? The man was stuck in an impossible situation where either decision, sitting on it until after the election or informing Congress that they would be reviewing new emails found on Huma Abedin’s laptop, was going to look political. Yet, Comey wanted to write an op-ed about the Russia interference as early as summer of 2016; the Obama White House vetoed his course of action. As for Russia, well, they didn’t hack our election. Interfere with it through state-funded media and social media trolls, yes. But these campaigns were not successful, as Facebook and a study published in The Economist said that fake news stories played no pivotal role.
The point is Clinton only has herself to blame for losing.