In her first television interview since the election, Hillary Clinton relitigated some of the 2016 campaign’s biggest talking points, saying “sexism” and “misogyny” were majors factors in her defeat.
“I started the campaign knowing that I would have to work extra hard to make women and men feel comfortable with the idea of a woman president,” Mrs. Clinton said in the interview with CBS broadcast on Sunday. “It doesn’t fit into the — the stereotypes we all carry around in our head. And a lot of the sexism and the misogyny was in service of these attitudes. Like, you know, ’We really don’t want a woman commander in chief.’”
The former Democratic nominee also refused to back down from her “basket of deplorables” remark, saying President Trump’s behavior and the indifference of his supporters were truly “deplorable.”
“Well, I thought Trump was behaving in a deplorable manner,” Mrs. Clinton said. “I thought a lot of his appeals to voters were deplorable. I thought his behavior, as we saw on the ’Access Hollywood’ tape, was deplorable. And there were a large number of people who didn’t care. It did not matter to them. And he turned out to be a very effective reality TV star.”
She did, however, call the scandal over her private email server her “most important” mistake.
“Oh, I think the most important of the mistakes I made was using personal email,” she said.
But the former secretary of state also suggested there was a double standard when it came to then-FBI director James Comey’s treatment of the investigation of her email server.
“At the same time he does that about a closed investigation, there’s an open investigation into the Trump campaign and their connections with Russia,” Mrs. Clinton said. “You never hear a word about it. And when asked later, he goes, ’Well, it was too close to the election.’ Now, help me make sense of that. I can’t understand it.”
Mrs. Clinton’s book about the 2016 race, “What Happened,” is scheduled for release on Sept. 12.
• Bradford Richardson can be reached at brichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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