OPINION:
Imagine, if you would, that a Republican presidential candidate, say Mitt Romney or John McCain, had spent the next 18 months after his loss moaning and groaning and blaming everything from the FBI to Russian bots to xenophobia for the loss — and the mainstream media covered the pity party.
That’s Hillary Clinton in a nutshell. The election was a year and a half ago, and Hillary is still on TV and selling out venues to hawk her pathetic book, “What Happened,” in which she blames everything and everybody but herself for her humiliating loss.
If you’re not keeping track at home, so far she’s blamed FBI Director James Comey, Russia, computer bots, WikiLeaks, Bernie Sanders, Facebook, Joe Biden, fake news, Twitter, voter ID laws, the vast right-wing conspiracy, sexism, Barack Obama, ageism, child sex pervert Anthony Weiner, white women, xenophobia, black people, the Electoral College, the DNC, misogyny, women cowed by their husbands — even former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (your guess is as good as ours).
And she’s still at it. On Monday, two days ago, Mrs. Clinton blamed her loss on the media — yes, the media that bent over backward (and often forward) to push her throughout the campaign. At the Pen America World Voices Festival, she said that “the mainstream political coverage was influenced by the right-wing media ecosystem.”
Mrs. Clinton said there was a “false equivalency” (meaning that Donald Trump didn’t have the stature that she did) and that negative media election coverage “had a leveling effect that opens the doors to charlatans.”
But that’s only her excuse for this month. Last month, she blamed white women who were too weak to stand up to their husbands or other men to vote for her.
“We do not do well with white men, and we don’t do well with married, white women,” Mrs. Clinton said at a conference in Mumbai, India. “Part of that is an identification with the Republican Party and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.”
Even husband Bill Clinton is getting in on the blame game, postulating another absurd theory for her loss. New York Times reporter Amy Chozick, in her new book titled “Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling,” describes what she calls an often-contentious relationship between the paper and the Clinton campaign.
Mr. Clinton, she wrote, started floating an idea: “After the election, Bill would spread a more absurd Times conspiracy: The publisher had struck a deal with Trump that we’d destroy Hillary on her emails to help him get elected, if he kept driving traffic and boosting the company’s stock price.”
That’s right. The New York Times, which was virtually an arm of the Clinton campaign, was secretly in the bag for Mr. Trump all along, working to get him elected so they could pump up their click count and make more money.
Ms. Chozick’s book has some other wonderful details about the night of her loss. “Hillary didn’t seem all that surprised. ’I knew it. I knew this would happen to me ’ Hillary said ’They were never going to let me be president.’”
She never says who “they” were.
Mrs. Clinton also knew that her line about all the “deplorables” supporting Mr. Trump was devastating to her campaign.
“Hillary always broke down Trump supporters into three baskets,” Ms. Chozick writes.
“Basket #1: The Republicans who hated her and would vote Republican no matter who the nominee.
“Basket #2: Voters whose jobs and livelihoods had disappeared, or as Hillary said, ’who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens in their lives and their futures.’
“Basket #3: The Deplorables. This basket includes ’the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.’
“The Deplorables always got a laugh, over living-room chats in the Hamptons, at dinner parties under the stars on Martha’s Vineyard, over passed hors d’oeuvres in Beverly Hills, and during sunset cocktails in Silicon Valley,” Ms. Chozick writes.
But Mrs. Clinton knows that cost her the election.
“’I really messed up,’” [Mrs. Clinton] told aides that night,” Chozick writes of the evening that the candidate’s “Deplorables” line went public.
So, Mrs. Clinton actually knows why she lost — and it wasn’t Russian bots or weak-willed women or even Rudy Giuliani.
It was her pretentious, holier-than-thou attitude throughout the campaign and her inability to connect with the half of America that she deemed “deplorable.”
She knows it — and we now know she knows it.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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