Talking points
Settling scores with Sanders
“Hillary, time to exit the stage,” said in .com. Not a year after her humiliating election loss to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton is back, hawking her campaign memoir What Happened, and assigning blame for her defeat on Russian meddling, the media, former FBI Director James Comey, sexism— and Democratic primary rival Bernie Sanders. Deriding his farleft policies as unrealistic, Clinton says Sanders’ attacks on her as a corrupt tool of Wall Street banks and rich donors did “lasting damage,” making it easier for Trump to paint her as “Crooked Hillary.” While perfunctorily admitting she made some big mistakes, Clinton clearly still does not realize why she lost: She was a weak, deeply unpopular candidate who simply did not stand for anything. Now her “Tour of Petty” is reopening wounds and further dividing a broken Democratic Party, said Katherine Timpf in NationalReview.com. “The fact that she lacks the self-awareness to see that is so Hillary it hurts.”
“Clinton is right about Bernie Sanders,” said Jill Filipovic in CNN.com. His “attacks on her character fed the same narrative as Trump’s,” and the number of disaffected Sanders backers in key battleground states who didn’t vote for Clinton was enough to swing the election. Sanders and his loyalists, meanwhile, continue to heap scorn on Clinton, while joining Republicans in telling the only woman in American history to run for president on a major ticket to “shut up and go away.” And not incidentally: Has any male politician ever been told to “say she’s sorry as often as Hillary Clinton?”
Clinton does have a real message in this book, said Bill Scher in Politico.com. She’s warning Democrats, “Don’t give Bernie the keys to the party,” or he’ll drive it off a left-wing cliff. In recent months, “Democrats are bending in his direction.” Witness how Sen. Kamala Harris of California and other potential presidential candidates are now lining up to endorse Sanders’ favorite cause: single-payer health care. Clinton, however, portrays Sanders as a socialist ideologue given to unrealistic promises, who “can’t make the trade-offs essential to governing.” Granted, she’s an imperfect messenger—a new NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll puts her approval rating “at an abysmal 30 percent,” 6 points worse than Trump’s. But perhaps Clinton’s unpopularity “liberates her to do what elected Democrats cannot: front-stab Bernie. After all, she has literally nothing to lose.”