Democrat operatives are terrified that Hillary Clinton’s inevitable buck-passing during her fifteen-city book tour to promote her election post-mortem What Happened will reopen wounds that are just beginning to scab after her unexpected defeat in November.
According to POLITICO, alumni of her Brooklyn campaign headquarters have reacted to the early stages of the tour with groans of, “Oh, God,” “I can’t handle it,” and “the final torture.”
Even elected Democrats are joining the public pile-on. In response to Clinton blaming primary opponent Bernie Sanders for “paving the way” that led to President Trump’s “Crooked Hillary” epithet, California Congressman Jared Huffman tweeted Tuesday night, “Please Hillary, don’t go there. I supported you. Bernie showed restraint & class & ran aspirational campaign. Politics is rough sometimes.” He then apologized for “man-splaining” in the final sentence but stood by the rest of his admonition.
So far, the woman who claimed the accountability and maturity to lead the free world has blamed dozens of events, ideological constructs, institutions, and people other than herself for her election defeat. The list includes the FBI, James Comey, “the Russians,” Vladimir Putin, “anti-American forces,” low information voters, the optimism of her supporters, pollsters, Barack Obama’s re-election, Barack Obama himself, voters’ desire for change, misogyny, suburban women, the mainstream media, television executives, cable news, Netflix, misguided documentarians, Facebook, Twitter, Wikileaks, “fake news,” Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Macedonia.
That’s an impressive list of enemies, even for a politician who has been building and maintaining such lists for decades, and this latest memoir hasn’t even yet hit bookstores. A new NBC News poll shows Hillary’s approval rating at 30%, the lowest ever recorded for her and lower than President Trump’s. Clinton’s relentless public appearances, coming to a city near you, will further entrench her as the face of her party, which offers two electoral benefits to Republicans: reminding the American people why they rejected her eleven months ago and rekindling Bernie Bros’ fury that the Democratic National Committee considered Clinton’s nomination an essential and foregone conclusion.
Republicans should revel in this opportunity. Democrats and the mainstream media — but I repeat myself — always insist on the “chaos,” “disaster,” and “turmoil” within the GOP. There are too many millions of headlines to list them all, but for a smattering consider The Week’s “The Malfunctioning Republican Party,” The Atlantic’s aspirational “Will the Republican Party Survive the 2016 Election,” and POLITICO’s frustrated “Why Hasn’t the Republican Party Collapsed?” Keep in mind that these headlines come at a time when the Republican Party finds itself arguably at peak historical strength, controlling the 27 state legislatures, 34 governorships, both houses of Congress, and the White House. Democrats have even been denied a judicial activist majority on the Supreme Court after President Trump’s victory gave us Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Democrats have made much media hay even during this time of Republican dominance. How much more might Republicans make out of the recent Democrat presidential nominee’s public crack-up as symbol of her party’s historic decay? As always, divisions exist even among parties in ascendance. While the Democrat operatives who pretend to be journalists on television and in print focus on the GOP’s relatively civilized internal debate over immigration, foreign intervention, and free trade, let’s shine a spotlight on the once-most powerful Democrat in the country’s vindictive sniping at her own fellow travelers. Hell hath no fury like a Clinton scorned, so while the Democrats expend endless energy focusing on the personality of President Trump, let’s keep our cameras focused on a character even less popular: former future president Hillary and her circular firing squad of a book tour.