HILLARY’S RETURN
A new book and a Toronto speech put Clinton back in the spotlight.
Last September, Hillary Clinton was getting ready for the presidential candidates’ debates — a spectacle that would include Donald Trump creeping up behind her on stage. A year and what probably feels like a lifetime later, Clinton is getting ready for another public tour, and a different, old rival is following close behind her — this time, only metaphorically.
Within 24 hours at the end of September, Toronto audiences will have a chance to hear from Clinton and former U.S. president Barack Obama.
Clinton is doing a book-launch event in Toronto on the evening of Sept. 28 at the Enercare Centre. The very next day, Obama will be in Toronto as well, speaking at a lunchtime event hosted by the Canada2020 think tank at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Obama will also be popping in at the Invictus Games, the Star reported this week.
The proximity of the two visits (not to mention the hefty ticket prices) could force some people to make a choice — not unlike one that U.S. Democrats had to make back in 2008: Clinton or Obama?
Ideally, however, one would see both. If you’re a Canadian still a bit surprised that Trump ended up in the White House last year, Clinton and Obama may be able to fill in some pieces of the puzzle. Clinton’s new book, after all, is titled What Happened.
Judging from the excerpts now emerging, the “what” is actually many things. Vanity Fair columnist Bess Levin summed up the multiple blame targets this week in a piece titled:
“A brief list of people Clinton blames for her election loss: Part 3.”
The list includes Bernie Sanders, former FBI director James Comey, the New York Times, sexism, Vladimir Putin and former vice-president Joe Biden. It also includes the two people speaking in Toronto later this month: Obama and Clinton herself.
About Obama, Clinton muses in her book about whether the president might have been more open with the American people about the Russian election-tampering efforts during the 2016 campaign.
“I do wonder sometimes about what would have happened if President Obama had made a televised address to the nation in the fall of 2016 warning that our democracy was under attack. Maybe more Americans would have woken up to the threat in time. We’ll never know,” Clinton has written in the book, according to one excerpt.
Drawing up these Clinton blame lists has become a popular pastime among pundits since her defeat, but it often strikes me as a bit of a cheap shot (not by this particular Vanity Fair columnist, I should say.) All this talk of blame seems to be a bid to cast Clinton as trying to evade responsibility, even as she has repeatedly claimed it.
“Every day that I was a candidate for president, I knew that millions of people were counting on me and I couldn’t bear the idea of letting them down. But I did. I couldn’t get the job done. And I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life,” she reportedly writes in the book. It’s roughly what she said to Obama, too, on election night, according to other reports, when she called the president and apologized for failing to keep the White House out of Trump’s hands.
Speaking of Trump, it’s probably safe to bet that most people attending the Toronto events will be wanting to hear some disparaging words about the president. If you’re paying to listen to Obama or Clinton for a couple of hours, you’re probably not a fan of the guy who won the election last November.
It will be interesting to see which one, Obama or Clinton, will have the more withering criticism. Neither has much to lose from doing so, and Obama has been a bit more outspoken even this week, with Trump’s decision to end a program that protected children of undocumented immigrants from deportation. (In a Facebook post, Obama called the decision “cruel” and “self-defeating.”)
If the next few weeks are anything like the past year, Trump will have given Clinton and Obama lots more to criticize when they get before their Canadian audiences.
One boast that Clinton and Obama can make in their back-to-back appearances this month is that they’ve paid more calls on Canada this year than Trump has. Obama did an event in Montreal in June and the Clintons vacationed in Quebec’s Eastern Townships this summer.
The new U.S. president, on the other hand, has yet to visit Canada and no plans for such a trip seem to be on the immediate horizon. Canadians wanting to hear from residents of the White House will have to content themselves for now with former occupants; two of them in one week this month. sdelacourt@bell.net