What Happened. Hillary Clinton lost.

Perhaps “How Did This Happen?” would have been a better title. As has been covered by Victory Girls previously, Hillary Clinton’s new book is busy blaming pretty much everyone but herself. It’s Bernie’s fault for even getting into the race, and then going even harder left. It’s Obama’s fault for telling her to play nice, and not pushing the Russian angle earlier. It’s always someone else’s fault.

On Sunday, Hillary continued to prove that she is completely tone-deaf by doing a book promotion in the middle of a huge hurricane. And yes, this was probably filmed ahead and in the can. You don’t think that Hillary Clinton could have called CBS and said, “Hey, this hurricane is pretty serious, so maybe we should push this video back a week”? Of course she could have.

Regardless, she continued with her blame game in her interview with Jane Pauley.

In this one clip, Hillary blames:
– bad analysis by reputable analysts (Nate Silver is mentioned by name)
– James Comey
– Russians
– negative press stories
– Wikileaks getting Podesta’s emails
– Facebook taking Russian money to run negative stories on her
– voter suppression
– sexism and misogyny (which she says is “endemic to our society”)

Wow.

There’s also this old proverb about “not counting your chickens before they hatch.” We frequently on this blog referred to “Queen Hillary” who was expecting a coronation, as if she was owed the nomination and the presidency. Well, that was more true than we realized.

Host Jane Pauley noted Clinton had been “so sure” she would be the one giving the inaugural address in January.

“You specifically bought this house for a reason,” Pauley said as they walked outside.

“I did,” Clinton said.

“And this was to be?” Pauley asked.

“Well, I know a lot about what it takes to move a president, and I thought I was going to win,” Clinton said.

“The Clintons had acquired the house next door to accommodate White House staff and security during a second Clinton administration,” Pauley narrated.

Interestingly, I had just finished reading Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s book Shattered just before the press for What Happened began. Let me tell you, there are narratives that directly conflict between that book and what Hillary Clinton is now saying in her book. Allen and Parnes gathered sources and followed the Clinton train, thinking they were going to write the defining biography of President Hillary Clinton’s successful campaign. But while their sympathies are definitely with Hillary, their book is a much more unbiased account of what was going on within the Clinton campaign.

First, Hillary’s campaign was chaos behind the scenes. Being a Clinton, she trusted nothing and almost no one. This meant that she set up rival factions within her own campaign (covered in chapter 2) in order to ensure that she was making all the big decisions. But when it mattered, some big decisions didn’t get made in a timely fashion. This also meant that information wasn’t passed along to key staff. When Hillary collapsed at the 9/11 event, the staff was caught completely flat-footed. The book gives the official reason for the collapse as “walking pneumonia,” which many people doubted at the time, but the campaign staff had no idea she was even ill (pages 317-319). This meant the campaign couldn’t even put out an official release (which many staffers blamed on Huma Abedin, for not informing them).

Second, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook ran his own data numbers (the book compares Mook’s methods to the movie Moneyball), and was convinced that the numbers wouldn’t lie to him. And he (mostly) convinced the rest of the campaign of the same. Interestingly, the one person who wasn’t convinced of Mook’s data-analysis campaigning… was Bill Clinton (pages 206-207). The data said “campaign in the big cities and lock up Obama’s minority base” (highlighted on pages 396-397). This led Hillary, who initially scheduled a joint rally in Green Bay with President Obama – which was canceled due to the terror attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, which happened three days before the rally was scheduled – to never reschedule a stop back in Wisconsin. Whose fault was that?

Third, Hillary still blames everyone else, when the fault lies with her for believing her own press. She really really really believed she was going to win. And the campaign believed it, so much so that Mook had a deal in place with Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway that the loser would make the concession call within 15 minutes of the Associated Press calling the race (page 382). But it took a while for her to come to grips with conceding, despite the promises in place – so much so that for those who remember, the crowd waiting for a Hillary victory speech at Javits Center in New York City instead got a lame “thanks for being here” speech from John Podesta. And it took Barack Obama telling her that the race was over for her to finally concede over the phone. And yes, she had no official concession speech ready, just a half-hearted rough draft (page 374), which is why it took her until the next day to actually give it.

Hillary may say “I couldn’t get the job done, and I’ll have to live with that the rest of my life,” but so far, it’s been everyone else’s fault that she didn’t win. Oh, and the fault of the electoral college.
https://twitter.com/gabrielmalor/status/906637333465894914
Add the electoral college to everyone and everything else under Hillary’s bus.