Archive for the ‘Hillary Clinton’ Category

Hillary Clinton: ‘I was the victim of a very broad assumption I was going to win’ – Los Angeles Times

May 31, 2017, 5:41 p.m.

Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday that she has no plans to run for office again, but she plans to remain involved in civic life, particularly helping the Democrats' efforts to regain control of the House in 2018.

I'm not going anywhere, Clinton said at the annual Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes. I have a big stake in what happens in this country. I am very unbowed and unbroken about what happened because I dont want it to happen to anybody else. I don't want it to happen to the values and the institutions I care about in America.

And I think were at a really pivotal point, she said. And therefore I'm going to keep writing and keep talking and keep supporting people who are on the front lines of the resistance."

The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee said she woke up on election day expecting to win. Clinton told the gathering that she was responsible for every decision the campaign made, though she did not believe they caused her surprise loss. She attributed thatto several things, including allegedRussian interference in the election and weaponizing stolen information and fake news. She also pointed a finger atthe Democrats for falling behind the GOP in using technology and data to target voters, the media for covering her e-mail controversy "like it was Pearl Harbor,"misogyny and the high expectations many had for her candidacy.

I was the victim of a very broad assumption I was going to win, she said, adding that she always expected the race to be close.

Trump responded on Twitter, saying that Clinton still refused to accept that she lost because she was a "terrible candidate."

Clinton,who has increasinglyjabbedPresidentTrump, including at last weeks commencement address at Wellesley College,blasted his reported plan to pull out of the Paris climate accord as really stupid because of the economic implications. She described his personality as impulsive and reactive.

And she joked about his peculiar overnight tweet about constant negative press covfefe, saying she thought it was a hidden message to the Russians to laughter from the audience.

Going forward, Clinton said that she believes that it was realistic for Democrats to retake the House in 2018, notably by focusing on Republican congressional districts she won including seven in California. She sounded less optimistic about the Senate.

Updated at 6:06p.m.: This post was updated to add President Trump's response to Clinton's remarks.

This post was first published at 5:41 p.m.

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Hillary Clinton: 'I was the victim of a very broad assumption I was going to win' - Los Angeles Times

Has-Been Hillary – National Review

The funniest episode in the protective yet revealing new Hillary Clinton profile arrives when we learn that this sad, unemployed, 69-year-old lady is so desperate to keep her self-image alive that she still employs flunkies and retainers to treat her as though she actually were the president, or the secretary of state, or a president in waiting, or at very least the leader of the opposition. Her longtime loyalists are so happy to bustle around her in the service of maintaining the illusion that, after she takes an hour away from it all to exercise, her communications director, Nick Merrill, breathlessly updates her on everything thats happened in the political world in the last threescore ticks of the minute hand. Her profiler, Rebecca Traister of New York magazine, obviously a great admirer but one who declines to throw herself overboard from reality for the sake of giving Hillary more company bobbing about in the sea of fancy, writes that Clinton listens to the barrage of updates, nodding like a person whose job requires her to be up-to-date on whats happening, even though it does not.

Ouch. Hillary Rodham Clinton isnt merely in a state of denial. She has become Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. Politically speaking, she is dead, but she doesnt know it. Her staffers are so many Haley Joel Osments too kind (and too attached to their salaries) to tell her that her career is over. She doesnt need briefings. She doesnt need to do interviews. She doesnt need to write the book she is writing (after so many indigestible volumes, why bother with one more?). She doesnt need to stake out a politically nuanced position on James Comeys firing or scramble to get out in front of the Resistance parade. She lost two exceedingly winnable presidential campaigns in Hindenburgian fashion. There is no demand for her to run again and there is nothing left for her except to receive whatever ceremonial honors and sinecures may come her way. She has been handed her political retirement papers by the American people. Shes done.

Clinton tells Traister, vaguely, Take me out of the equation as a candidate. You know, Im not running for anything, and indeed she isnt, right now, since this isnt an election year. Yet nothing Clinton does these days makes sense unless you keep in mind that she actually thinks she could run again. Take her Wellesley address on Friday: utterly bonkers for a commencement speech. Newly minted graduates expect to hear something useful or at least funny or informative or, failing all else, sentimental. Clinton did a bit of this, then started lobbing word-mortars far over their heads at Donald Trump, making the kinds of Nixon comparisons that every Democrat, and lots of non-Democrats, have been making for months.

Why bother pursuing such a trite theme? Because Clinton was eager to show the Washington political hacks that she is still a tough operator, a leader of the anti-Trump movement, a player. She was, in other words, campaigning. To all appearances, the game is long over. Yet she is still on the field, because the game isnt over to her. Hey, theres another election in three and a half years, folks. And need we remind you who won the popular vote?

In Traisters profile, Clinton (again) deflects attention from her own self-evident flaws to blame her defeat on others. She again blames James Comey, with zero acknowledgment that her own actions to evade scrutiny of her e-mail were the cause of Comeys entirely justified and indeed shockingly forgiving criminal investigation. She (again) blames the Russians, even though even she acknowledges that the actual content of the WikiLeaks e-mails from her own fellow Democrats was inconsequential. She (again) blames misogyny, a non-falsifiable theory with no evidence behind it except that citizens supposedly came up to her and said things like, Gosh, Im not sure were ready for a woman president, with the added fillip that women who voted against her are internalized misogynists. She blames the suppression of the vote, particularly in Wisconsin, channeling an investigation from progressive fantasists published in The Nation that is so lacking in credibility that it was debunked by Slate and ignored by most of the Hillary-friendly media.

Clinton does not mention that she made more campaign stops in Arizona than in Wisconsin. She forgets that she ignored the advice of her own husband that it was unwise to write off white working-class voters. She does not allude to her having hidden from the public a bout with pneumonia until she was forced to release information when a random bystander happened to make a video of her collapsing on a mild day in New York City. She doesnt reflect on her uninspiring speeches or her off-putting personality. Traister doesnt press her on any of these matters, and the anticipation of that treatment is why Clinton agreed to speak to someone like Traister in the first place.

In lieu of all of this, Clinton seeks to present herself as the most forceful opponent of the Trump administration. Should the president be impeached, shell be able to say: Hey, I called it! But she isnt leading the national conversation, shes mouthing along with it, like any other retiree talking back to cable news at home. Even if the Trump administration proves to be the catastrophe she foresees, there is no reason the Democrats would turn back to her for a third run. Every time she draws attention to the Trumpian flaws that were conspicuous to all during the campaign, she doesnt hear the obvious rejoinder echoing in every Americans mind: Then why couldnt you trounce him?

READ MORE: Hillary Clintons Electoral Rationalizations Have a Dark Side Hillary Clintons Loss Was Hillary Clintons Fault Hillary Clintons Shattered Expose: A Quick Examination

Kyle Smith is National Review Onlines critic-at-large.

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Has-Been Hillary - National Review

Hillary Clinton blames voter suppression for losing a state she didn’t visit once during the election – Washington Examiner

Hillary Clinton did not set foot in Wisconsin for the whole of the 2016 general election.

Not once.

The former secretary of state defends the decision to this day, arguing that her campaign data showed she personally didn't need to bother with the Badger State. That's reasonable. After all, data is fallible.

What's embarrassing is that Clinton has expanded her list of excuses for why she lost Wisconsin to include "fake news," WikiLeaks emails and allegations that Gov. Scott Walker suppressed the vote.

Conspicuously absent from her list of excuses is any mention of the fact that she didn't campaign in Wisconsin.

Clinton was pressed for answers on her campaign blunder Wednesday afternoon by Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, who is himself from the Badger State.

"I'm from Wisconsin. Why didn't you spend more time in Wisconsin?" he asked to audible gasps at the Recode conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.

"We thought we were doing really well in Wisconsin. I spent a lot of time in Pennsylvania, a lot of time in Florida. We sent a lot of great surrogates, including [Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va.] and others to Wisconsin you make these scheduling decisions based on the best information that you have, and it turned out that, you know, our information was not as reliable as I wished it had been," Clinton said.

Clinton also blamed her loss on Scott Walker's support for voter ID laws, accusing the Republican governor of being part of a larger effort to disenfranchise voters.

"The other thing that's in hindsight, which is really troubling is the [Associated Press] did a really well-researched piece about voter suppression in Wisconsin, and they literally found people who showed up to vote and were turned away because Wisconsin, under the current governor, Scott Walker, has been one of the leaders in voter suppression. Making it difficult," the failed presidential candidate said.

The article to which Clinton referred Wednesday is titled "Voter ID law proved insurmountable for many in Wisconsin."

Clinton said, "The best estimate is that 200,000 people in Wisconsin were either denied or chilled in their efforts to vote. I don't think we believed at the time before the election that it would be anything like that. Anything as big as that."

Roughly 300,000 eligible voters in Wisconsin "lacked valid photo IDs" ahead of the 2016 election, the AP story reported.

However, the article, which was published on May 9, does not provide citation for its number. Further, the report also stated specifically that, "It is unknown how many people did not vote because they didn't have proper identification."

Well then.

Clinton wasn't done: She also blamed the WikiLeaks email scandal and a rash of "fake news" stories for distorting Wisconsin voters' perception of her as a presidential candidate.

"So some people stayed home. Some people voted for Trump. Some people stayed with me, and some people went third party," she said. "It was a confluence of all kinds of things."

Sure, it was a confluence of events, not least of all the fact that she never visited the damned state. You know who could've cleared up those supposed "fake news" misconceptions about Hillary Clinton? Hillary Clinton.

Trump won Wisconsin by more than 20,000 votes, a margin of victory that actually increased during a hotly contested recount effort.

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Hillary Clinton blames voter suppression for losing a state she didn't visit once during the election - Washington Examiner

Hillary Clinton: Russia Got Help From Americans in Election Meddling – Wall Street Journal (subscription)

Hillary Clinton: Russia Got Help From Americans in Election Meddling
Wall Street Journal (subscription)
Hillary Clinton on Wednesday said she believes that Russians likely received help from inside the U.S. on how to effectively use the information that intelligence agencies say was gathered to meddle in last year's presidential election, which she lost ...

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Hillary Clinton: Russia Got Help From Americans in Election Meddling - Wall Street Journal (subscription)

Hillary Clinton warns: ‘Putin wants to bring us down’ – Boston Herald

Hillary Clinton warned that the technological forces that conspired to sabotage her presidential bid in 2016 are still very much at play in an interview Wednesday at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.

"I think it's important to learn the real lessons from this last campaign," she said. "The forces aren't just interested in influencing elections and politics. They're going after the economy and our unity as a nation."

Clinton spoke in great detail about how a massive Russian-led misinformation campaign scuttled her chances with the help of social networks that weren't properly empowered to combat fake news.

"What we saw in this election particularly the first time we had the tech revolution really weaponized politically," Clinton told Code Conference interviewees Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. "It was aimed at me but it's a much deeper more persistent effort to literally turn the clock back on so much of what we have achieved as a country."

Clinton also singled out Vladimir Putin for having big ambitions that go way beyond her in his pursuit of destablizing the country.

"It is important that Americans, that people in tech and business understand that Putin wants to bring us down," she warned. "He is an old KGB agent."

Clinton addressed the incident last week in which Montana congressional candidate Greg Gianforte div-slammed a reporter days before the election he ended up winning. Citing a report that an NBC affiliate in Montana declined to use the audio of the incident in its coverage as part of a broader mandate by stations owned by Sinclair Group to keep its programming conservative-friendly, she commented, "I find that terrifying. Because local TV is still incredibly powerful."

Just because Clinton lost the election shouldn't give anyone the impression she is about to exit the political scene. "I am not going anywhere," she said. "I am very unbowed and unbroken about what happened because I don't want it to happen to anyone else. I don't want it to happen to the values and institutions i care about in America."

2017 Variety Media, LLC, a subsidiary of Penske Business Media; Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

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Hillary Clinton warns: 'Putin wants to bring us down' - Boston Herald