HIL YEAH, I AM BACK!
Days after Super Tuesday, Hillary Clinton is back.
The former secretary of state, U.S. senator from New York, and failed presidential candidate returned to the limelight with a new documentary from Hulu, cleverly titled “Hillary,” to share her side of things.
“Hillary” breaks little news and jumps between a taped interview with Clinton, conversations with friends and staffers, and footage from her campaign and early life.
Here are five takeaways.
She takes credit for the #resistance
Clinton thinks her failed presidential campaign was the impetus behind a flurry of Women’s Marches and female political candidates.
“There were a lot of lessons that people can and I hope will learn from the campaign, but what I loved was the reaction to the loss and the resistance that grew up because of it. It began to sprout almost immediately,” she said. morning the Monica Lewinsky story broke and denied the affair entirely: “There’s nothing to it. It’s not true.”
Hillary said she believed her husband and instead turned her ire to Ken Starr.
“I was absolutely persuaded, because of my own experience, not what anyone else went through, what I went through, that this guy would make up stuff,” she said. “If they could make up something, if they could lie about something, they were so partisan that they would do it.”
In a 1998 NBC interview with host Matt Lauer clipped for the documentary, Clinton alleged a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”
In August 1998, during a live TV broadcast from the Map Room of the White House, Bill Clinton admitted to “a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate.”
She’s still going after Bernie Sanders
The 2016 Democratic primary will never die.
Although the documentary was filmed long before Bernie Sanders became one of the front-runners in the 2020 primary, Clinton and her staff were already laying the groundwork to oppose her former opponent and his voters.
“I worry that there’s an underlying level of vitriol in some percentage of Bernie supporters,” Jake Sullivan, her senior policy advisor, said in a behind-the-scenes video.
Later in “Hillary” she says she feels “bad for people who got sucked into” Sanders’ candidacy.
Obama was sold on her as secretary of state
Former President Barack Obama, who bested Clinton in the 2008 primary, made a brief appearance in the documentary to praise his rivalturned-coworker.
“Me deciding to ask Hillary to become my secretary of state was a no-brainer for me,” Obama said. “I never wavered from my basic view that she was smart, sophisticated about policy, cared deeply about the same issues that I cared about and, keep in mind, I was coming in at a time when I knew that I was going to have to devote an enormous amount of time to preventing a great depression.”