Clinton rips rival Sanders in her new book
2016 presidential candidate criticizes Democrat opponent for helping Trump get elected
Hillary Clinton’s book, What Happened, is due out next week. And judging by a page that was just tweeted by one of her staunchest supporters — not to mention plenty of other evidence — 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’s 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 cared that his 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.”
This isn’t likely to help the Democratic Party heal any time soon. I’ve argued before that Clinton’s decision to dwell upon the many allegedly unfair reasons for her election loss — Russia, James Comey, misogyny, debate questions, etc. — are likely to distract from the truly difficult work Democrats face in determining how they lost the Rust Belt to Trump.
This passage doesn’t exactly read like a take-no-prisoners accounting; it’s more understated than that. Much of it is technically true. The tactics of the “Bernie Bros” were indeed often sexist. Sanders still isn’t a Democrat, and he never claimed that his campaign was about helping the party — a party he long derided as insufficiently progressive. He clearly wanted to “disrupt” it to some extent. But inside the measured language are some pretty harsh judgments of Sanders.
“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,” she said.
Maybe that’s just politics, you might say. Well, the Sanders-led opposition to Clinton always considered itself to be about principle, whatever the costs of taking that principled stand (even President Trump). Clinton is questioning that entire conceit, saying Sanders’s reasons for causing that upheaval weren’t justified.
For a candidate whose supporters were adamant about their cause, that’s going to sting. It’s the equivalent of throwing gasoline on the embers that remain from the 2016 primary.