It’s Putin’s fault or Comey’s fault, but not Hillary’s
Hillary Clinton and her inner circle seem to be handing out lots of blame for her defeat.
But almost no one is blaming the candidate for failing to do what the Democrats once thought would be easy, beating Donald Trump.
The press usually revels in party-in-disarray stories, and this one has all the elements: the fall of the House of Clinton, the Democrats controlling nothing on the Hill and losing governorships. There has been a little bit of that, but the Trump transition has sucked up most of the media oxygen. And the former Democratic nominee has been keeping such a low profile that the Washington Post did a piece on neighbors hunting for Hillary in the Chappaqua woods.
But the finger-pointing is truly striking, because it doesn’t deal with the core issues that caused Clinton to lose: She had no message, especially not an economic message. She all but ignored Wisconsin and Michigan. She failed to build a personal narrative. She crippled herself with the private email server. She was a status quo candidate in a change election. She was so hypercautious about her media appearances that even Rachel Maddow couldn’t land an interview. Her platform was basically, Donald Trump is crazy and I’m not.
Even President Obama has acknowledged that the Democrats failed to connect with paycheck-to-paycheck voters at the grass roots. But there has been little such reflection from the Clinton camp.
Instead, Hillary Clinton says Russian hackers came after her campaign and the DNC because Vladimir Putin “has a personal beef against me.”
That may be true, especially since Trump campaigned for friendlier relations with Moscow. Clinton told a group of donors in Manhattan that “the press is finally catching up to the facts,” and that “this is an attack against our country.” And that is true, assuming the murky leaks about the CIA and FBI findings are accurate.
