There's Something About Hillary

In case you haven't heard, Hillary Clinton has a new book out.   Not surprisingly, response has been all over the board, largely because she seems to take pretty much everyone to task, except herself, for her electoral loss.

One of her favorite targets is Bernie Sanders, who she thinks undermined her in the primaries, and laid the groundwork for Donald Trump's "Crooked Hillary" campaign.  That's a pretty bold assertion, especially given that he campaigned for her quite actively in the general election, particularly in the Midwestern states where she was most vulnerable.

What's most interesting in her attacks on Bernie is that she portrays him as a shallow politician, pushing gimmicks rather than solutions.  She compares him to the "deranged hitchhiker" in Ben Stiller's There's Something About Mary.  Not having seen the movie, I had to watch a clip to familiarize myself with this character.

It seems Hillary picked up her metaphor from a meme, which has been floating around the past few years, rather than the movie itself.  The "deranged hitchhiker" is how she feels about Bernie for crashing her party.  That damned sense of entitlement.

It wasn't so much that Bernie was pitching "abs routines," as he was pushing her further to the left than she wanted to go.  The minimum wage battle was a classic one.  Hillary opted for the more conservative $12/hour, whereas Bernie wanted $15. Bernie didn't do this just to make it bigger.  This was the minimum amount deemed to be a "living wage."  Several cities had already adopted the $15/hr. minimum wage and Bernie stood by it.  After a whole lot of hemming and hawing, Hillary decided to go with $15 too, as she saw this was the direction the Democratic Party was headed.

But, Hillary doesn't stop there, she goes after the "so-called Bernie Bros," who she claims harassed her supporters on line.  That maybe so, as in this day and age pretty much anything goes on line, but Bernie's supporters cut across gender lines.   There were a lot of women who had concerns with Hillary, as made painfully clear in the general election, when she failed to nail down white women.  To be fair, white women generally vote Republican but here was a white woman running for president.  Surely, she could do better than 43 per cent!

For a self-described political wonk, this seems to be a very glaring mistake, especially when one of Bernie's most visible supporters was Susan Sarandon, an actress loved and respected, although some of that respect probably fell off after her strident comments during the general election.  Susan made no apologies for her disdain of Hillary.

Where Bernie had difficulties was in allying minority voters to his cause.  Here, Hillary was able to outstrip him and ultimately secure the Democratic nomination.  He didn't stand a chance throughout the South, and Hillary thrashed him in California.  However, none of these states mattered in the general election except maybe Florida.

The states that did matter were the Midwestern states, seen as a  Democratic "blue wall."  Bernie beat her in Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana and Minnesota.  As it turned out, Michigan and Wisconsin were very pivotal states, which for some odd reason she chose to limit her campaign.  I suppose she felt she had these states in the bank, particularly Michigan, which Obama won by 450,000 votes in 2012.  Obama had won Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin by more than 1 million total votes.  Kind of like spotting Team Hillary 21 points in a football game.

In the end Bernie won 23 states, not because he "impugned" her character, but because there were a lot of folks in the Democratic party who didn't want Hillary, or felt that Bernie stood for something bigger.  It was basically a repeat of 2008, in which she entered the campaign as a heavy favorite only to be outmaneuvered by a younger, more dynamic Barack Obama, who took full advantage of the discord in the party.

Her big advantage this time around was that she had the Democratic establishment in the bank, having secured all but a relative handful of superdelegates before the primaries began.  This put Bernie in a 500 delegate hole, which he was never able to get out of.  It also helped that she faced no challenge from the Democratic orthodoxy.  The other "Democrats" who ran were also outsiders like Bernie, and dropped out within the first few weeks of the primaries.

It seems that Hillary no more wants to confront the truth of this election than do her most avid supporters.  This is what could do lasting damage for the Democratic Party, as there are many Democrats who hold onto Hillary as if she is the Susan B. Anthony of our generation.  It's just too bad she got tripped up by a "deranged hitchhiker" like Bernie Sanders.