By Holly Scheer • The Federalist
Hillary Clinton isn’t ready to let go of her election loss to President Trump. Clinton is in Mumbai, India, at the India Today Conclave, a “a meeting point for the best minds from India and around the world to map the geopolitical and economic future of the country.” But instead of keeping her focus on the complex and numerous problems facing India, Clinton took aim Monday at Americans who voted for Trump. Her patronizing and condescending words targeted voters in states that twice voted for Obama, and show she still doesn’t understand why Americans didn’t vote for her.
Clinton compared herself to the mother of the country, trying to enforce something wholesome that the children aren’t fond of. She said, “She ran the presidential campaign like a mother who was telling the kids to eat spinach because it was good for health while the other guy was asking them to go eat fast food and have ice-cream,” India Today reported. Clinton may not have realized it, but this also sheds a lot of light on how she sees the average American. She views them as short sighted, more interested in junk than substance, and in her words, they’re “backwards.”
Clinton reduced huge populations that voted for and against her to caricatures, by describing them as: “optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward, and his whole campaign ‘Make America Great Again’ was looking backwards. You know, you didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women, you know, getting jobs, you don’t want it, you know, see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are. Whatever your problem is, I’m going to solve it.”
She traveled overseas to talk poorly about Americans, instead of building up the people that she campaigned to represent. Rural America is dealing with a host of serious issues, including poverty, joblessness, an opioid epidemic, a staggering suicide rate, and she doesn’t touch on any of these problems or offer possibly solutions.
Of the states she talks about specifically, six of them voted for both her husband, Bill Clinton, and for Barack Obama. Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida (with the exception of FL, which went to Bob Dole in 1996) together make up 99 electoral votes, a significant chunk of the needed 270 votes to win an election. These aren’t states that have always gone straight to the Republican party, but rather were states that she could have won if she understood what voters wanted.
Calling Trump’s campaign the first “reality TV campaign,” she also said that voters, “have to be prepared to say OK that was entertaining, wow, couldn’t take my eyes off of him, but what’s he really going to do and what has he ever done that convinces me that he could actually accomplish any of it. So it’s going to require a lot more sophisticated analysis by voters if this trend goes from our 2016 campaign.”
Her implication here is that American voters weren’t smart enough or sophisticated enough to realize what was happening and see through the showmanship of the campaign and pick what she clearly still thinks was the better of the two candidates — herself.
She also discusses the controversial Russian collusion aspect of the election, but she pared it down to very simple terms, and assumed that all of the Russian interference helped Trump. She credited the Russians with attacking her campaign via Facebook, and with spreading “misinformation.”
It’s clear Clinton still resents losing the election, and wants to remain relevant in American and international politics. She hasn’t yet figured out how to do this without tearing down the electorate, and embracing that even Americans who make disappointing voting choices are still represented by the President. All of the red America between the coasts is still fully America, and needs and deserves representation and a voice. Democratic hopefuls for 2020 might benefit from a little bit of the looking backwards she so despises, and reconnecting with what Americans want and need instead of constructing a strawman to mock in front of foreign audiences.