Clinton’s New Low
Hillary Clinton last week didn’t just repeat her claims that she was robbed on Election Day, she also announced she’s joined “the resistance” — which has to be asking itself, “Do we get to say no?”
Losing presidential candidates usually go away, and for excellent reasons: They’ve just proved they don’t know how to win. Their party may be the opposition to the winner — but it needs new leadership to counter his agenda.
It’s beyond ironic that Clinton staked a claim to future leadership so soon after “Shattered” hit the stores. The book is a devastating portrait of just how screwed-up her campaign was — and how much of that was her own damn fault.
The lack of any real message. The dysfunctional leadership. The failure to grasp what was moving the electorate. The penny-pinching on basics like polling, campaign literature and even signs. The blindness to the evidence of trouble in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida and so on.
Plus, all the bad press about her e-mails, her lucrative Wall Street speeches, Clinton Foundation influence-peddling and so on was her own damn fault.
She didn’t need the Wall Street money, or the foundation’s. And she sure didn’t have to set up that email server, or use it to put the nation’s secrets at risk — or tell lie after obvious lie about it all.
Yet she’s still in denial — blaming Jim Comey, the media and the Russians. Even if they were the ones that hanged her, she provided the rope.
To be fair, she was a graceful loser for the first 24 hours, saying all the right things about hoping Trump would “be a successful president for all Americans” and “we must accept this result and then look to the future.”
But, as “Shattered” also reveals, she started plotting to delegitimize President Trump the next day: pushing the claim that his team colluded with Russia, when the WikiLeaks stuff that was Russia’s central mischief-making was the least of her problems.
What makes this so low and self-serving is that she’s undermining not just the president, but faith in the system — merely to salve her own ego.
The whole conceit of “the resistance,” with its nod to the men and women who risked their lives during the Nazi Occupation of France, is pathetic: Trump did not actually lead an armed conquest, he won the election fair and square, and he’s governing with full respect for the courts, Congress and all the many checks on any president’s power.
Yes, we get why so many Democrats feel so outraged. It’s a huge shock to lose despite a hefty popular-vote margin, they hate where Trump’s leading the nation — and Trump is, well, Trump.
But turning the tide is all about normal practical politics. Wallowing in conspiracy-theory explanations for how the country got to this point alienates as many people as Trump on his worst day.
By choosing to feed the paranoia to make herself feel better, Clinton is betraying everyone who voted for her.
Then again, she did lose by thinking everything was all about her, and not them.