Clinton Reveals The Decision She 'Regrets The Most' In New Memoir

[DonViejo]

By NICOLE LAFOND Published SEPTEMBER 6, 2017 12:00 PM

In her third memoir, set to be released next week, Hillary Clinton reportedly owns many of her mistakes that lead to her defeat last November, but she also places some of the fault on her former Democratic opponent and former FBI Director James Comey.

She said her biggest fault was running a “traditional” campaign instead of a “reality TV show” campaign like Donald Trump did. Trump’s camp “relentlessly stoked Americans’ anger and resentment,” she wrote, according to CNN. The network purchased the new book, titled “What Happened,” a week before its widespread release.

“I think it’s fair to say that I didn’t realize how quickly the ground was shifting under all our feet,” she said. “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.”

Her critique of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) ties into her disdain for Trump, saying Sanders’ attempts to damage her image during the primaries made way for Trump to latch onto the “crooked Hillary” rhetoric that was so emboldening for his base.

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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/cnn-clinton-blames-sanders-comey-russia-mostly-herself

[bettyellen]

1. People wanted to be dazzled. It's beyond my comprehension as to why...

[JI7]

2. Not all people. They had to believe this bigoted ignorant white man was superior

Since he was one of them.

[NewJeffCT]

6. Trump took it to the extreme, for sure

but, if you go back to Reagan becoming president, the more charismatic candidate has always won.

Reagan - the most charismatic Republican of the last 60-70 years - beat Carter and then Mondale, both of whom are smart and very capable, but not charismatic.

HW Bush vs Dukakis - neither was charismatic, but Dukakis took blandness to epic levels.

Clinton vs Bush and Dole - Bill Clinton was very charismatic and smart, but Bush and Dole were neither.

Bush vs Gore and then Kerry - Bush had that fake "down home" regular guy charm while Gore was elitist and arrogant and Kerry was stiff and elitist.

Obama vs McCain and Romney - same as Bill Clinton - Obama is very charismatic and smart, McCain and Romney are not

Trump vs Clinton - smarmy con-man charm and media magnet vs the smart, experienced and capable Clinton.

[bettyellen]

21. Media magnet yes- charismatic is a stretch for me, but I guess if buffoons can be charismatic

Then the word applies to him. I really think his charisma was manufactured by the media allowing him to lie through his teeth for so long. They should have called him out. They acted like he was so powerful, treated him as a credible person when it was all so completely undeserved. They could have pulled the rug out from under him countless time, but they didn't want to ostracize him as was deserved. So strange.

[NewJeffCT]

22. W's charisma was manufactured by the media as well

to the tunings of Karl Rove - I mean, W was born into wealth in Connecticut, but played the down home Texas cowboy when running for president, right down to the ranch.

[bettyellen]

24. True, the style over substance thing is true. And people wanted to take their anger out on .....

I'm not sure who, but now it's unleashed on all of us- but POC and women in particular.


Did you watch AHS Cult? It starts up on Election Day, and seems to be much about the cult of anger going on. Interesting and creepy as hell.

[brush]

25. Yeah, remember that "clearing brush on the ranch" scthick?

Rancher my ass, it's rumored that he was scared of horses.

[Cuthbert Allgood]

31. You can go back to Kennedy

That is the beginning of the modern President. Nixon killed Kennedy in that debate on the issues, but image was everything and that was the beginning of the TV campaign.

[Alice11111]

39. Well said...so we need a smart, honest charmer. Kennedy, Franken, Booker for VP

DT may state that he will move pence to AG and put Nikki Haley on the ticket. It could be tough.

[JI7]

3. She would never have been able to get away with that

They would have attacked her for it.

[Hekate]

7. Hysterical wimminz, amirite? -- Also, HRC could never pull it off. She is thoughtful, above all else

And she won by 3,000,000 over DTs

[NewJeffCT]

8. if everything about the elections are really revealed in the end

I'm guessing the "millions of illegal votes" that Trump harped on many times was really millions of illegal votes for Trump via Russian Hacking and outrageous voter suppression. I mean, for all his faults, Trump is a master of projection and almost every exit poll was better for Clinton than the "actual" results.

Crooked Hillary
Low Energy Jeb Bush
Lying Ted Cruz
Little Marco Rubio
Crazy Bernie Sanders

[Hekate]

28. I reached the same conclusion long ago. Whatever he accuses others of doing, is what HE is doing...

How much do you want to bet he had someone "wiretapping" and surveilling both Obama and Hillary, and was astounded and outraged at how clean both of them are?

[Hortensis]

36. I'd bet nothing. The man must have had his team chewing their nails and

carrying their bug-out bags around with them in case this supposed micromanager spilled what they couldn't keep from him. And, "lordy," how they must have tried.

(Those with a shred of competence, anyway. Like that creepy weirdo Robert Spencer and the crew at Cambridge Analytica. FBI Director Comey for sure if he was colluding with the campaign itself. I'm thinking the Kochs, though.)

[Alice11111]

40. !!!

[Tanuki]

4. I'm glad she did not stoop to that level and retained her dignity.

The level of disgrace Trump has brought upon us should not be normalized.

[Hekate]

5. I think she's right. We had a woman who talked policy and won by +3,000,000, but lost the EC...

In opposite corners, we had two men who yelled and waved their arms and growled. I find that juxtaposition odd. Be that as it may, one of those men was sincere, and he got emotions running high. The other man was a congenital liar who stoked every negative emotion in the human repertoire.

And look who "won."

She's right, and I can hardly wait to read her book to get the context she puts it in.

[LisaM]

10. I'm looking forward to reading it, too. And I'm really glad it doesn't sound as if's a mea culpa.

She's had ten months to reflect and make honest assessments, and it sounds as if it was written from the heart. I think she has every right in the world to examine all the different forces that were at play in this election.

I'm really getting tired of huge campaign rallies with their rock concert mentality. It's been a drag on our elections since 2004, in my opinion, when there was the Howard Dean craze. I went to one of his speeches and it just seemed like a pep rally, lots of sound bites, no policy discussion, and a bunch of people flocking to it because it was a popular thing to do, not because they wished to ponder all the different issues. (I read an interview with Howard Dean not too long ago where he reflected on this, and said that the crowds were expecting the sound bites and essentially the same speech every time, and it didn't really give him a chance to delve deeper into policy).

[Cuthbert Allgood]

32. So Sanders Trump?

That's just hyperbolic nonsense.

If you think Sanders ran the same campaign as Trump did, you were watching something else.

[Hekate]

42. Except that is not what I said, is it? Bellowing and arm-waving are reserved for male candidates...

Style, tone, and volume are all heavily gendered in the public arena.

Better?

[Alpeduez21]

9. Hillary Clinton lost because

of racists and Russia. All ya'll better get the vote out for the democratic candidate in your district. Racists underpoll. I live in VA. The governors republican primary was between Gillespie and Corey Stewart. Stewart was supposed to get crushed in this primary. Stewart supports everything Trump, opposes any opposition to confederate ideas, and supports voter suppression. Prospected to lose by 10 or more points. He barely lost.

Clinton was supposed to win. The racists carried the day. Look at any poll for any election then add 5 or 10 points to the republican to account for the racists he or she will get.

[StevieM]

46. She would have won--by a lot--had it not been for an out-of-control, GOP-led FBI. (eom)

[procon]

11. She didn't need to emulate Trump.

It wasn't Clinton's style to fight fire with fire and and she often said she avoided the press, but Clinton was faced with a perfect storm of factors she had little control over. She always took the high road, and in any other campaign that was the right way to go for any serious candidate, but Trump wasn't serious. He was a joke, the buffoonish clown, the racist, sexist, hateful, fearmonger, he was the flaming bag of exploding shit, and the media loved him for wallowing in his own pool of stinking piss.

There was probably no way she would have survived the massive, multifaceted assault on her character and her policies coming from so many different directions, maybe no one could have.

[Alice11111]

43. !!!...but her camp could have made major efforts in Mich, Wiss, and purple parts of Penn. They

Ignored hundreds who tried to rtell them. DT ran a better camp...I was on both lists. The Dem material was often awful. I hate DT,the destroyer of our coutry, maybe yet the planet. I agree between Comey, fake news, & all, she didn't have much choice. Fuck sanctimonious Comey. I hope he remains " mildly nauseaus"

[Hekate]

44. Well said, procon

Perfect storm

[geek tragedy]

12. This is like answering "I'm a perfectionist" to the question "what's your biggest weakness?"

"My biggest weakness was that I had carefully thought-out policies and painstakingly built coalitions."

Come on.

In reality, she had the same problem Gore had in 2000--she was an insider, status quo candidate during a change election.

[R B Garr]

13. No, she's saying she should have been a loose cannon like everyone else.

She should have called Trump out on his bleached hair bad dye job, and so-and-so's rumpled suits and no one has single payer in Vermont anyway, so wtf stfu.

[geek tragedy]

14. Because that worked wonders for Little Marco.

What Clinton is doing here is pointing at her strengths and pretending that they were her weaknesses. That way people can say "oh 2016 was so unfair to her."

This is not useful to future candidates.

Obama had "carefully thought-out policies" and "painstakingly-built coalitions." They weren't and aren't weaknesses.

Being seen as part and parcel of the political establishment is definitely a weakness.

[R B Garr]

18. lol, you made her point for her with this wraparound statement.

She said that playing by the rules (establishment??) was a mistake while everyone else was having a food fight.

[geek tragedy]

20. it wasn't the food fight, it was the fact that the public wanted change.

After 8 years of continuous party control of the White House, the electorate is primed for the other party to take over.

Doesn't mean that's rational, but it's a thing.

[bettyellen]

23. Oh please. The DNC convention was some ugly food fight. As was the NV caucus. Kids wanted blood and

Now that they have it, they act all surprised. Bullshit.

[djsunyc]

15. nah

i think her problem was having the nerve to believe the american people would make a sound logical decision instead of a manipulated emotional one.

[geek tragedy]

16. the political cycle made this a tough climb for Clinton.

After 8 years of the same president, voters want something new.

Twice now--2000 and 2016, Democrats have run exactly the wrong kind of candidate following 8 years of a popular Democratic president. A certain category of voter gets restless and will want something new.

[brush]

26. Pls stop with all of that. The repugs cheat, and that includes political hack Comey.

Gerrymandering, vote suppression, vote hacking, caging, mis-info campaigns, last minute letters 2 weeks before the election, a clear violation of the Hatch Act by an FBI Director who of course knows that.

That's who the repug party is so stop with the accepted wisdom/media pundit/repug talking points such as emails and Benghazi and on and on as to why Hillary lost.

Again, she lost because repugs cheat, it's the only way they win.

We experienced a stolen election, a coup, and it's time we all recognize that, accept it as fact and get on to combating their cheating because as hard as we try our traditional "get out the vote" drives, they try just as hard to suppress out votes and it becomes a wash.

If we stop their cheating by half we get that many more votes. We won't stop it all but the bigger the dent we put in their cheating and publicize it far and wide, the more votes on the positive side we realize.

[Egnever]

34. Yup

people wanted to shake up the system. Many voted for Trump in an effort to shake things up in Washington. Sadly most don't realize the way to shake things up is to kick out the tea party.

[RandomAccess]

51. Great insight

When I read the OP, I was agog. Whaaa? Clever dodge. Or perhaps self-delusion.

[zipplewrath]

17. Poor judgement again?

Isn't she really saying she showed poor judgement again?

Her Iraqi vote. Her decision to mix private emails with public business on a personally controlled server. Declaring the TPP to be the "gold standard" before it was even done. And we can talk about "Hillary Care" and what went wrong there.

The political landscape was changing and she didn't notice. Whose fault is that?

Ya know, the sad part is, and I'll wonder about this for a long time....

During the 08 primaries, she asserted that Obama didn't understand how hostile the GOP would be. She was right. He didn't and they achieved new levels of hostility, in part because he refused for so long to understand. I think she was dead right about this and I wonder how different things would have been if we'd given her first crack. She could have even offered him a cabinet post in the second term to build up his run in 2016.

[leftstreet]

27. Good question, but I think it would have failed

The reality is as bad as Obama got it from the rightwing - there was still a degree of restraint based on their fear of being perceived as racists. It was all dog whistling and subtle and pushing the edge.

Sadly, misogyny isn't nearly as publicly unacceptable to those same people. She would have been crucified. Not that she couldn't have handled it, but I don't think it would have led to an Obama run

[zipplewrath]

30. could have handled it

I wonder if they would have tried the same strategy with her that they did with him. I'm dubious. I think she would have played hardball straight out of the gate. She had a good "counselor" with whom to work. And his run led to hers. I almost think that the reverse would have been easier some how.

[BainsBane]

29. This is more of Hillary not taking responsibility

Not that this will impact the meme. Truth never does.

[Egnever]

33. That's the problem with running 70 year old candidates

They are resistant to change. Exp is good but when that experience locks you into your viewpoints or behavior regardless of external forces it is a problem.

[Major Nikon]

35. I don't think it was a change

If you look at all the presidential elections for the past 40 years, it's always been about appealing to emotion.

[Egnever]

37. Absolutely but the ground game has changed considerably

The fight has moved from tv to the internet. And when the opponent is sucking all the oxygen out of the air on the TV you need to do something to shake things up.

Her biggest problem in my.opinion is she is to tied to the old guard. Both of her campaigns were nearly identical against Obama and Bernie poll tested pablum designed to not offend anyone.

The public is sick of platitudes. They want someone who is willing to fight for them no matter how obnoxious they are.

I don't think anyone really understood how far they would be willing to let it go. Trump pushed all the boundaries but it was his willingness to point fingers at even his own party that made people think he was going to shake things up.

Obviously all here recognized what a train wreck he was buy your average voter barely pays attention.

They saw someone willing to kick ass and take names. Complete bullshit of course but when the public is sick to death of Washington they guy who trashes it the most is going to hit that emotional button.

If there was ever a more establishment candidate in my lifetime I am not aware of them.

[dsc]

38. that is complete bullshit

She embraced black lives matter, which is hardly non contraversial. She embraced gun control which isn't non contraversial. She was utterly pro choice, yet again, not without contraversy. She gave passports to the transgender and on and on.

[JI7]

41. She was the first and only dem(or any) pres candidate the so fully and openly

Embraced the diversity from undocumented immigrants muslim refugees black lives matter transgender people.

Obama always held back but when he commented about minorities being unfairly targeted by police his approvals went down among whites.


This support for three diversity and which made up her biggest supporters is what hurt her.

[Hekate]

45. Her policies for employees at State were also liberal, as she was an early supporter of same sex...

...marriages for people under her aegis.

But "she was status quo and avoided con troversy" and all that bullshit.

[StevieM]

47. I am sure that the media will claim she was too hard on Comey and equally sure that when I read it

I will conclude that she was way too easy on him.

[Gothmog]

48. I am looking forward to reading this book

[WinkyDink]

49. I hope HRC achieves the catharsis she desperately needs. Get this monkey off

her back!

[Ron Green]

50. It's strange that she's never read a book by George Lakoff

or Jonathan Haidt, or if she has, ignores it.

[USALiberal]

52. I am glad she remained classy and used intelligence! n/t