We’re in the last days of the Barack Obama presidency, and the Democrats have turned into a virtual laughing-stock in their attempts to de-legitimize Donald Trump’s presidency before it even starts. They’ve tried placing the blame on Hillary Clinton’s loss in November on the media, WikiLeaks, the Russians – everyone and everything except where it belongs: on the candidate herself and President Barack Obama, whose policies and legacy she was being pushed to support from the Democratic Party’s far left.
As the days of Barack’s presidency dwindle down to a precious few, there continues to be a lot of whining and hand-wringing over how a seasoned “can’t-miss” candidate like Hillary Clinton failed so miserably to beat the likes of Donald J. Trump. As much as I was a Trump guy, I recently watched several of the Republican primary debates and still have a hard time believing the guy got away with some of the crap he got away with. But he did, and he did by partly by playing the role of a “larger than life” candidate, partly because none of the other candidates had the stones to stand up to the Trump bully. A lot of Democrats and liberals still have a hard time with this, and to be brutally honest, I can’t blame them.
But, as the saying goes, it takes two to tango, and I’ve said in this forum ever since she first ran as presumptive nominee in 2008 against a (then) upstart Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton was, is, and will now forever be, near the top of everyone’s list as the worst candidate to ever run for President. And it’s not because she was unqualified (although, I would argue how being a former First Lady, a do-nothing senator from New York, and an abysmal Secretary of State serve as qualifications), it’s because the only reason she was put into those positions in 2008 and 2012 was because her last name was Clinton. As a candidate she was cold, wooden, distant, shrill, churlish, unattractive (did anyone ever wear uglier clothes?), and prefabricated; as a person I would add to that lazy, privileged, and possessing of incredibly poor judgment.
As much as I would like to crow about Donald Trump winning the election, the overwhelming evidence is not so much that Trump won as much as Hillary lost. While it is clear that Trump deserved the win that he got – after all, more than anything else, he absolutely out-worked Hillary – it was still her election to lose, and lose it she did. Forget about the three million votes that I believe will ultimately be uncovered as fraudulent; even without those votes (they coming primarily from the “blue” states of California, Nevada, and New Mexico) she came within a whisker’s breath of winning Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin – states that should have been no-brainers within the Clinton camp.
So why weren’t they? I’m not much of a Huffington Post reader, but in this case this article is a must-read for all you Democrats and liberals pounding the pavement to protest Trump as if he took something away from you. In the end, Clinton supporters out there have only Hillary to blame:
Bill Clinton once said “I feel your pain,” a turning point in the 1992 election. Hillary’s team asked focus groups to describe working-class pain. Then they chose the language that offered the highest probability of an applause. Then they hired a team of PR consultants operating from an Alexandria-based office overlooking the Potomac. Or were they in Georgetown? None of them actually knew what it felt like to lose a job and a house in a period of two weeks. Trump, meanwhile, dug a finger into voters’ wounds and screamed, “Do you feel that? You know who did this to you!”
…Clinton embodied everything that Americans have grown tired of. She profited immensely from her public resume, earning more in 30 minutes giving a speech to a bank than many Rust Belt voters earn in six years. One must lack a moral code to deny the crony nature of the Clinton Foundation. One must suspend all belief in common sense to think that a private server was initiated for matters of convenience when an uncovered e-mail from 2009 said that “HRC does not know how to use a computer to do e-mail, only bb [Blackberry].”
Read the whole thing (and, if you’re a Democrat, weep). Everything I’ve always said about Hillary Clinton manifested themselves in the 2016 election. The sense of entitlement, aloofness, and condescending attitude towards not just Trump supporters, but her own Party and supporters (who she thought were dumb enough to consume the focus-group slop her handlers ensured her would work) – all those chickens came home to roost. She was an empty shell either so detached from reality that she thought the election was in the bag and that she didn’t have to work for it or ill-informed and ill-advised by the people she surrounded herself with that the sense of entitlement she felt created a bubble she could never escape from. Was it the Russians who advised Hillary to ignore the pleas of her campaign in Wisconsin and not visit there for a single rally? Was it the Russians who told her to call half the electorate “deplorables”, or take days off from the campaign trail while Trump was holding as much as three rallies a day?
My view is that Hillary was simply out-worked and out-hustled by Donald Trump because, when it came to the American presidency, he just wanted it more. And people fed off that passion and energy. Had Hillary been a more attractive candidate (in every manner of speaking), she might have gotten away with it. But she wasn’t, and the Democratic establishment that allowed themselves to be hood-winked by the promise of a Hillary Clinton candidacy – not once, but twice – have only themselves to blame. Except they can’t. After all, it’s far easier to blame the Russians.
Look at it this way: while I’ve never been much of an Obama fan, can you imagine the soon-to-be former president making a video like this? It really encapsulates who Hillary Clinton was and why her candidacy was rejected by so many voters. But that’s OK as far as I’m concerned: let the Democrats continue to think it was the Russians who voted Trump in, and let them continue to de-legitimize his presidency. If they think 2016 was bad, wait till they see what the 2018 mid-terms bring.