Why? – Hil
Clinton admits ‘dumb’ moves, still can’t understand loss
HILLARY CLINTON is still “at a loss” about her loss.
In leaked excerpts from her upcoming election memoir “What Happened,” the defeated Democratic candidate admits to mistakes, regrets and “dumb” moves from her presidential bid — but says she still does not understand why so many Americans dislike her.
“What makes me such a lightning rod for fury? I’m really asking. I’m at a loss,” she asks in the book.
“I think it’s partly because I'm a woman.”
CNN obtained a copy of the book — which officially hits shelves next week — from a Florida bookstore that had it for sale early.
Based on extensive excerpts from CNN, Clinton strikes a conciliatory but defiant tone in the book, admitting only up to a point that her own mistakes may have sank her second run for the White House.
“I go back over my own shortcomings and the mistakes we made. I take responsibility for all of them. You can blame the data, blame the message, blame anything you want — but I was the candidate,” she writes.
“It was my campaign. Those were my decisions.”
She says it’s “fair to say” her campaign missed the national mood in 2016.
“I was running a traditional presidential campaign with carefully thought-out policies and painstakingly built coalitions, while Trump was running a reality TV show that expertly and relentlessly stoked Americans’ anger and resentment,” she writes.
She also admits to a series of fatal flubs on the campaign trail.
A comment about wanting to put coal miners out of business was the remark “I regret the most,” she says. She acknowledges the bad “optics” of giving paid speeches to Wall Street firms before beginning her campaign. And she says her decision to use a private email server as secretary of state — which set off a scandal that sprawled through her entire campaign — was “dumb.”
But she still has plenty of blame to go around.
Most of it centers on Russia’s cyberattacks on the election, which multiple U.S. intelligence agencies have determined to be a Kremlin campaign to help Donald Trump.
She says she hoped to get into the White House to show Russian President Vladimir Putin that “his efforts to influence our election and install a friendly puppet had failed.” BERNIE SANDERS is going high. The Vermont senator on Wednesday brushed off accusations from Hillary Clinton’s upcoming memoir that he damaged her presidential campaign — and advised his former rival to get with the times. “My response is that right now it’s appropriate to look forward and not backward,” Sanders told The Hill. “Our job is to go forward.” Sanders said he wasn’t interested in parsing blame for Clinton’s loss and would “let the people decide” about her criticisms. In early excerpts from Clinton’s book “What Happened,” she singles out Sanders as one of the major factors for her failure.