Why Hillary lost: It’s not what she thinks

HILLARY Clinton missed mentioning the three people who actually were responsible for her election defeat last year.

Hurricane Hillary blew through the news almost as powerfully as Harvey and Irma last week when excerpts of her book, “What Happened,” leaked to certain publications.

Most Democrats hated what she wrote, but that’s another story altogether.

I have some sympathy for Hillary, who’ll go down in history as the biggest bungler of what everyone — except me — considered the surest thing there ever was.

In a minute, after building up just the right amount of suspense, I will mention the names of the three people Hillary should blame in her next book — if any publisher is foolish enough to let her write it.

“What Happened” is available in stores this week and, if we are lucky, nobody will buy it and Clinton can melt off into the quiet retirement that should have begun immediately after her embarrassing defeat to Donald Trump last November.

Clinton apparently does blame herself somewhat for the loss — as difficult as that must have been for someone that self-centered.

But she mostly placed responsibility on, in no particular order, former FBI Director James Comey (who exonerated her of crimes she probably committed), Bernie Sanders (who had the audacity to run a tough primary campaign against her), President Obama (who had the nerve to revive Clinton’s professional career after she lost to him in 2008) and the Zamboni driver at Madison Square Garden (who I threw in here just to see whether you are paying attention).

Who’d she miss? Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen. This past presidential election was about the economy, which we now know was doing a lot worse than was being revealed by Washington at the time of the election.

Greenspan, Bernanke and Yellen were, of course, the last three heads of the Federal Reserve. And each one played a part in the disastrous US economy over the past decade, which played a major part in Hil- lary’s election loss in November.

Yellen has been more of a caretaker to the controversial money-printing policies implemented by Bernanke to fix the mess that Greenspan left. And if those aren’t enough people to fill out her next book, Hillary can add the late Osama bin Laden to the list of election villains.

Back in the late 1990s, Greenspan began an easy money policy that included low interest rates even though he knew the stock market and housing market were in dangerous bubbles.

Why’d he do that? First, because he was too cowardly to raise interest rates and upset his political friends, mainly the Clintons.

Greenspan was the boy who wanted to be liked, so he caved on monetary policy.

Bill Clinton’s impeachment gave him the first excuse to keep rates low. He didn’t want to take the chance that he’d slow the economy at a politically sensitive time; that’s is what Greenspan would say.

And when bin Laden’s terrorists attacked the US in 2001, Greenspan had even better cover for his low rate policy.

Bernanke, who took over as Fed chairman in 2006, inherited a mess, although he didn’t know it at the time.

Then, in late 2007, the so-called Great Recession hit and Bernanke had to ease interest rates even more as well as institute the risky policy of quantitative easing, which Yellen is now trying to undo.

Through all this, the US economy suffered through the kind of growth that doesn’t get incumbent parties re-elected to the White House. In other words, Hillary’s only chance of winning the presidency was for Trump to do and say things that couldn’t be forgiven.

Trump came very close, but elections are always, ultimately, about the economy. (“It’s the economy, stupid,” Bill Clinton kept reminding himself when he was running in 1992. Bill should have reminded Hill of that maxim.)

How bad was the economy last year?

According to the gross domestic product, the economy grew at only a 1.6 percent pace in 2016.

But that’s not the number to look at — Americans don’t measure their happiness in GDP figures.

Americans care about real disposable income — commonly known as their take-home pay. And no incumbent party has retained the White House, according to ShadowStats.com, during an election year when real disposable income grew at less than 3.1 percent. According to Washington’s first numbers, take-home pay was growing at only a 2.33 percent rate in 2016. That would have been enough to sink the Democrats. But that number has since been revised to growth of just 1.38 percent. And remember, also, that those low interest rates were depriving Americans of trillions of dollars in interest income. And that — unlike gains occurring in the stock market — feels a lot like llost take-home pay. So Americans were suffering income deprivation at the same time they were hearing all those “crooked Hillary” stories about how she and Bill had enriched themselves through shady deals that were only available because of their political connections. Hillary’s book should have been called “Why I Didn’t Have a Chance.”