‘Nobody likes him’: Clinton risks party split after comments on Sanders
WASHINGTON — For three years, Hillary Clinton has watched the Democratic Party search for a path forward in the Trump era.
She’s watched as liberals and moderates clashed on how best to fight President Donald Trump and a White House that was almost hers. She’s watched as some voters questioned the “electability” of the six women running for president, doubts that she once faced. She’s watched as Sen. Bernie Sanders has risen, after his withering opposition to her in the 2016 presidential primary, to become the dominant progressive force in the 2020 race.
And she’d largely refrained from weighing in — until Tuesday morning, when the Hollywood Reporter published an interview with Clinton promoting a new documentary about her that will premiere Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival. In the documentary, she ripped into Sanders and declined to say if she would endorse him and campaign on his behalf if he were to win the Democratic nomination.
“Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician,” she said. “It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.” Asked by the Reporter recently if that assessment still held, she replied, “Yes, it does.”
However, Clinton tried to clarify her remarks Tuesday evening. “I thought everyone wanted my authentic, unvarnished views!” she wrote on Twitter. “But to be serious, the number one priority for our country and world is retiring Trump, and, as I always have, I will do whatever I can to support our nominee.”
Clinton’s criticism of Sanders in the interview promoting the documentary ricocheted across the Democratic Party on Tuesday, threatening to reopen the barely healed wounds of the 2016 primary, a race that quickly turned from a near-coronation of Clinton as the party’s first female nominee into a bitter battle that exposed a deep ideological rift among Democrats.
That split over what direction the party should take is now a major issue in the current primary, with Sanders arguing for the full-throated leftist agenda and others counseling moderation. At the same time, he is engaged in a standoff with his liberal ally in the 2020 race, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, that has divided some on the left, over her accusation that he told her in 2018 that a woman could not win the presidency.
Sanders has denied that remark. Clinton, for her part, seized on it and said it was “part of a pattern,” noting that he said in 2016 that Clinton was unqualified to be president.
Some Democrats fear that Clinton is adding fuel to the tensions within the party, whose leaders have spent years trying to overcome the lingering hostilities of the 2016 campaign, hoping to unify Democrats around the singular mission of defeating Trump.
“I just don’t think it’s appropriate for Democrats to be criticizing other Democrats, especially with personal attacks like that,” said Gilberto Hinojosa, the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, who supported both of Clinton’s primary bids. “I understand why there can be bitterness out there. I believe we just need to leave that behind us.”
Speaking to reporters Tuesday in Washington, Sanders said: “Secretary Clinton is entitled to her point of view. My job today is to focus on the impeachment trial.”
When asked for his response to Clinton’s assertion that no one liked him, he joked that “on a good day, my wife likes me, so let’s clear the air on that one.”