Former President Bill Clinton had a harsh — and definitely Not Suitable For Work (NSFW) — assessment of his wife’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, saying, according to a new book from author Ryan Grim, that her campaign “could not sell p***y on a troop train.”
According to Grim’s book, “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution,” former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s mistake was in leaning too hard on identity politics — which he argued was an attempt to damage her main primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) by claiming that he was “sexist,” among other things.
“To the extent that the campaign tactic moved the needle at all, it likely pushed moderate voters paying only marginal attention to the campaign towards Sanders, who spoke like a normal person while Clinton began ascending into what her ally James Carville would later call, ‘faculty lounge speak,'” Grim wrote.
Carville, a longtime Democratic strategist, later raised his concern on that point several times, arguing that the average American voter was likely to be turned off by people using language that they didn’t understand.
“They come up with a word like ‘Latinx’ that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like ‘communities of color.’ I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I don’t know anyone who lives in a ‘community of color.’ I know lots of white and black and brown people and they all live in … neighborhoods,” Carville explained in 2021. “This is not how people talk. This is not how voters talk. And doing it anyway is a signal that you’re talking one language and the people you want to vote for you are speaking another language.”
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But Bill Clinton put his beef in much starker terms, according to Grim’s book.
“Former President Bill Clinton, surveying the landscape and the ham-handed efforts at identity politics was bereft, lamenting to a longtime friend in the fall of 2016 that Hillary’s campaign ‘could not sell p***y on a troop train,'” he wrote.