Hillary's Excuses

While in India, Hillary Clinton explained her 2016 loss to Donald Trump as coming from the backward, sexist, racist part of the country.

If you look at the map of the United States, there is all that red in the middle, places where Trump won. What that map doesn't show you is that I won the places that own two thirds of America's Gross Domestic product. I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, Make America Great Again, was looking backwards. You don't like black people getting rights, you don't like women getting jobs, you don't want to see that Indian American succeeding more than you are, whatever that problem is, I am going to solve it.

She also said that she lost white women because of men.

We do not do well with white men and we don't do well with married, white women. And part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.

What to make of this, besides too much chardonnay?

First, it's likely that Hillary has been saying this in private for some time and it became so natural to her that she slipped and said it in public. It's happened before. When she made her Basked of Deplorables speech in 2016, sources admitted that she'd been saying that for some time but only in private fund-raisers, not in public.

Does Hillary actually believe that the majority of white women in this country are so cowed that they vote, in private, as they've been instructed by bosses and sons? This seems a little delusional but, yes, she probably believes this.

This is really part of a trend among the Democrats that goes back to the 2004 book, What's the Matter With Kansas? This book held that the Democrats' policies were best for the people of Kansas but, because of Republican distractions, they were enticed to vote against their own best interests. In other words, Democrats didn't need to change their policies, they just needed to package them better.

Hillary's take of that in 2016 was that half (or more) of Trump's supporters were never going to vote for her because they were terrible, terrible people. Now she's refined that. She was obviously the best candidate and it was the duty of women to vote for her but all of those men wouldn't let them. This lets Hillary off the hook. She doesn't have to face that she was a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign with no real message. It wasn't her fault, it was those deplorables.

The only real question is how much of the Democratic party shares that viewpoint?