National Post (National Edition)
Sanders helped Trump get elected, Clinton says
TELL-ALL BOOK
WASHINGTON • Hillary Clinton’s book is due out next week. And judging by a page tweeted by one of her staunchest supporters, it’s likely to include a heaping dose of score-settling.
That includes with Bernie Sanders.
In the passage tweeted out Monday evening by Tom Watson, Clinton attacks some of Sanders’ supporters for being “sexist” and suggests the Vermont senator doesn’t have the Democratic party’s true interests at heart.
Most notably, she also intimates that he may not have even cared that his underhanded (in her opinion) attacks on her helped Donald Trump become president.
“When I finally challenged Bernie during a debate to name a single time I changed a position or a vote because of a financial contribution, he couldn’t come up with anything,” she wrote. “Nonetheless, his attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump’s ‘Crooked Hillary’ campaign.
“I don’t know if that bothered Bernie or not.”
Clinton continues: “He certainly shared my horror at the thought of Donald Trump becoming President, and I appreciate that he campaigned for me in the general election. But he isn’t a Democrat — that’s not a smear, that’s what he says. He didn’t get into the race to make sure a Democrat won the White House, he got in to disrupt the Democratic party.”
At the end of the page, Clinton concludes by saying: “I am proud to be a Democrat and I wish Bernie were, too.”
This, needless to say, isn’t likely to help the Democratic party heal any time soon.
Given the book’s What Happened title and this past, it was clear Clinton would be doing a fair bit of blame-sharing in the book. What wasn’t as clear was how much she would dwell upon Sanders’ shockingly competitive challenge to her in the Democratic primary.
Much of it is technically true. The tactics of the “Bernie Bros” were often sexist. Sanders still isn’t a Democrat, and he never claimed his campaign was about helping the party. And the seeds of the idea that Clinton was corrupt were planted and tended to in the primary.
“Because we agreed on so much, Bernie couldn’t make an argument against me in this area on policy, so he had to resort to innuendo and impugning my character,” Clinton writes.
It’s the equivalent of throwing gasoline on the embers that remain from the 2016 primary.