For almost eight years, Hillary Clinton has been playing a very, very long session of Monday morning quarterback, always focusing on the same damn game: the 2016 Presidential election.
You’d think it would get boring at this point.
Especially since our country has undergone seismic events that make 2016 feel like ancient history. It’s time to move on.
But Clinton is as engaged as ever in this post-election analysis. She’s prolific and innovative when it comes to mining blame and finding fresh excuses to explain her upset loss to Donald Trump.
Clinton sees scapegoats everywhere.
Her latest target is women. (Credit where credit is due: At least she isn’t calling us “uterus owners.”)
Women were, she says, led astray by an old Clinton bogeyman — former FBI head James Comey, who re-opened a last-minute investigation into her private email and called her actions “extremely careless.”
“But once he did that to me, the people, the voters who left me, were women,” she told the New York Times in an interview Saturday.
“They left me because they just couldn’t take a risk on me, because as a woman, I’m supposed to be perfect. They were willing to take a risk on Trump — who had a long list of, let’s call them flaws, to illustrate his imperfection — because he was a man, and they could envision a man as president and commander in chief.”
Women hypnotized by the patriarchy were too dumb to see she was the truth and the way. It was lady on lady sexism, you see.
Clinton could fashion a large patchwork quilt with all of the people she’s pointed fingers at. She even wrote a book about it in 2017, called “What Happened.” She started out by taking some ownership.
“You can blame the data, blame the message, blame anything you want — but I was the candidate. It was my campaign. Those were my decisions,” she wrote.
But old habits die hard. She then dedicated much of it to blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin for her failure. And the media, particularly the Times. And Bernie Sanders. And Trump.
She even speculated that, if Barack Obama had truly gone to bat for her, and for democracy, it would have been a smelling salt awakening us to the dangers of Trump.
“I do wonder sometimes about what would have happened if President Obama had made a televised address to the nation in the fall of 2016 warning that our democracy was under attack. Maybe more Americans would have woken up to the threat in time. We’ll never know,” she wrote.
(Never mind that plenty of people who voted for Obama twice pulled the lever for Trump.)
What establishment pols like Clinton don’t get is that the electorate hears them, loud and clear. It is the pols who aren’t listening to the voters.
The reality is, Clinton was cocky. She thought she had the vote in the bag, and that calling people who felt left behind “deplorables” would be good for business. She neglected Rust Belt states and never even went to Wisconsin — becoming the first Dem presidential nominee to lose that state since 1984.
She was also thoroughly unlikable, enlisting a bunch of coddled celebrities to sing her anthem “Fight Song.” It was campaign kryptonite.
This fixation on her loss feels a bit like the orange man she is railing against. She claims to hold some sort of moral high ground, even though she spent years calling him an “illegitimate president.”
She can blame women all she wants. We are not a monolith. We all have different viewpoints, different reasons for voting the way we do. The women I know who voted for Trump weren’t avoiding placing a woman in the White House.
They simply did not like her, specifically.
They wanted something different. Someone different.
If she wants to blame one woman, she’s welcome to it.
That lady is in her mirror.
