During a recent Q&A during a conference in California, Hillary Clinton claimed that she “inherited nothing” from the DNC, throwing Debbie Wasserman Schultz under the bus for her poor leadership. While it is true that Wasserman Schultz was a horrible leader, it is past time for Clinton to accept some responsibility for running one of the worst campaigns in modern political history. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcript:
On Wednesday of this week, Hillary Clinton during a Q&A session at a conference out in California said that she inherited nothing from the Democratic National Committee, the DNC, which at the time was run by Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Effectively, Hillary Clinton threw Debbie Wasserman Schultz under the bus in saying that, “The DNC was so horribly managed. They were bankrupt. They had no money. They had no infrastructure. They had no money coming in, and that is why I, Hillary Clinton, lost the 2016 election. It’s all that darn Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s fault. Right, guys? We all don’t like her. Please just love me.”
That’s basically what Hillary Clinton is doing here. She understands that a lot of people in this country, specifically those who supported Bernie Sanders, don’t like Debbie Wasserman Schultz. It’s the cool thing to do to not like Debbie Wasserman Schultz, or at least it is in Hillary Clinton’s mind; so, she came out, tried to jump on that anti-Debbie Wasserman Schultz anger and said, “You know what? I’m right here with you, guys, she was bad. Right?”
It doesn’t work like that, Hillary. Here’s the thing. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was absolutely horrible running the DNC. I’ll give you that. That’s not a statement that I’m going to disagree with you on. It was lacking money; but, all Debbie Wasserman Schultz did was focus on getting corporate money in there, so it wasn’t bankrupt, as you say, and there was money coming in. I mean, even after you won the official nomination, individual Americans, just like with Bernie Sanders, began pouring money into the campaign, into the DNC. Corporations, unfortunately, also poured in a lot of money to the DNC.
So, you can’t necessarily blame this all on her. Hell, if it wasn’t for her, you probably wouldn’t have been the nominee. The only person you can blame for your 2016 election loss, Hillary, is yourself. You had some very bad advisors, but they were the people that you chose. If they were bad, if they were horrible, you can’t necessarily blame them, because you had the ability, the authority, to get rid of them and replace them, but you chose not to.
You’re the one who made the choice to not go visit the Rust Belt. You’re the one who made the choice to not go get in front of cameras to do interviews as often as Donald Trump did to get your message out to the American people. Instead you chose to meet behind closed doors with your corporate donors. Instead of meeting with average citizens who have legitimate concerns about the direction of this country, you let Donald Trump hijack the message, hijack those voters, and con them into voting against you. You are the only one to blame for that.
So, yes, there are plenty of problems at the DNC. There were back then, there are today, and there’s going to continue to be problems at the DNC until we get that corporate money out, until we get those old establishment Democrats out, but it wasn’t their fault that you lost. It wasn’t the Bernie voters. It wasn’t the Stein voters. It wasn’t the Gary Johnson voters. It wasn’t even the Trump voters. The reason Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election is because she ran a bad campaign.
You cannot blame anyone other than Hillary for that loss, and she needs to take that responsibility so that every one of us can move on and work towards building a better Democratic party that doesn’t repeat the same mistakes that have cost us election after election after election.
