Nobody’s talking about it, but President Trump appears to have kicked his habit of rehashing the 2016 election. The same, however, cannot be said for Hillary Clinton, and some Democrats have just about heard enough.
Last night we reported that Clinton’s own former campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle slammed Hillary over her bizarre recent comments. This morning, the Hill reports that some of Clinton’s former aides, surrogates and ideological peers are echoing this, and saying the former presidential contender should maybe tone down the carping about the 2016 election. Many, are in fact angry, and believe it’s harmful to the party.
And for anybody who isn’t Hillary Clinton, apparently, it’s fairly obvious why somebody might want this. During a conference in India this weekend, Clinton boasted that states that backed her in the election were more “economically advanced” than states that backed Trump. That remark echoed another Clinton gem – her famous “basket of deplorables” comparison – which helped galvanize popular opinion against the former first lady by exposing her for the out-of-touch elitist she is.
But that wasn’t all: Clinton also claimed that women who voted for Trump mostly did so because that’s what their husbands (or sons or bosses) wanted, which doesn’t sound very feminist to us.
Even Clinton’s closest allies admitted that these comments were “cringeworthy,” and they worried Clinton’s continuing commentary could hurt red-state Democrats during the mid-terms in November 2018.
“She put herself in a position where [Democrats] from states that Trump won will have to distance themselves from her even more,” said one former senior Clinton aide. “That’s a lot of states.”
Another surrogate who spoke with the Hill questioned Clinton’s rationale for making these remarks, and for months now, many party insiders have privately grumbled that her remarks have been counterproductive.
Though one former Obama aide argued that, if Clinton can’t or won’t be silenced, it’d be best if she got all of these responsibility-deflecting comments out of her system.
One former senior Obama White House aide added, “If these statements are a form of catharsis, it would be in the Democratic Party’s best interest for her to get these out of her system soon.”
“We need leaders like her to look forward to 2020 and how to unify the party, not continue to re-litigate the past.”
Even a spokesman for the Republican National Committee admitted that, though they’ve been trying *not* to focus on Clinton – her latest gaffe was too funny to ignore.
“At the RNC, we try not to continue to focus on Hillary Clinton. We really do try very hard,” Reed said. “But this one is impossible to ignore.”
Clinton also claimed during her diatribe that Trump voters “don’t like black people getting rights,” and “don’t like women getting jobs.”
“Putting aside how absurd and wrong she is, rhetoric like this is the reason Sen. [Jon] Tester was forced to release an ad today, 8 months before Election Day, attempting to highlight areas of agreement with President Trump,” the RNC spokesman said. “The Democrat brand is isolated, elitist, and as out-of-touch as it ever has been.”
And as long as Democratic candidates are chained to this perception, they will continue to lose elections. They might even lose to Trump in 2020.
via RSS http://ift.tt/2pavYNj Tyler Durden