I’m sure you all enjoyed the endless clips over at Clinton campaign headquarters in New York City on election night 2016. The scores of crying Democrats stunned, shocked, and totally devastated that Lady Macbeth would never become president—ever. Yet, members of the news media also exhibited those feelings of despair. Cortney wrote about The New York Times’ Amy Chozick, whose new book about the 2016 election suggests that Hillary Clinton was fully aware that people thought she sucked. Chozick wrote that Clinton told a pollster, “Oh, what’s the point? They’re never going to like me,” speaking about her image, along with not being happy at all about a potential presidential bid launched by then-Vice President Joe Biden. If Clinton was referring to the GOP voters, specifically those in the white working class, she should have tried to do something on this front.
She lost this bloc of voters to Trump by a three-to-one margin. If it had been just two-to-one, she would be president. It was not necessarily a hard sell either. These people want border enforcement, job creation, tax relief, trade policies that works, and most of all, someone who cheerleads for the country; that was conspicuously absent with Obama. The first two issues were actually the keys to these folks. Having voted for Obama twice and not getting much economic help, Clinton needed a message; she didn’t have one. She had a 2005 Access Hollywood of Donald Trump making very crude remarks about women—and no one outside of LA, D.C., and New York cared.
Chozick also says that she cried while penning the piece detailing that Donald J. Trump had soundly defeated Hillary Clinton (via WaPo):
The first time Chozick, as a young reporter covering the 2008 campaign for the Wall Street Journal, attended a Hillary Clinton town hall, she briefly stood up and started clapping when the candidate walked in. (“What the hell are you doing?” a colleague admonished, tugging at her coat.) The day after the 2016 election, Chozick sat in her cubicle and wrote the “how she lost” story. “Then I finally cried,” she writes.
When she felt insecure at work, Chozick would channel Clinton. “I adopted Hillary’s mood,” she recalls. “I went around despondent and aggrieved, pissed off at the world, at my editors, at myself for not being ‘likable enough.’ ” But that’s not the Clinton she wants to remember, Chozick concludes. She wants to remember the Hillary who “tried to hold it all together — her marriage, her daughter, her career, her gender, her country.” The Hillary who taught her about grit, to believe she could excel but also to allow herself to stop striving.
“Hillary taught me all of that,” Chozick writes in her final lines. “So what if she hated me?”
And that’s the irony. Apparently, the Clinton team does not like Chozick, calling her a dishonest broker (via Free Beacon):
Chozick frets in the book about her relationship with Clinton, mourning at one point to her husband that, "she really, really hates me." She also viewed herself as a symbol of Clinton's distrust of the press.
"Ours was destined to be an impossible, tortured, and unrelentingly tense relationship weighed down by old grudges and fresh grievances," Chozick writes. "To Hillary, I was a big ego with no brain and no amount of cordial small talk could make up for the bad blood between her world and mine."
Chozick is not alone. It seems a lot of Democrats are still crying over Hillary’s loss.
