Matthew Continetti
Washington Free Beacon
May 5, 2017
I thought she’d disappear.
I thought if Donald Trump became president Hillary Clinton would recognize her error, would spend more time in the woods. Maybe she’d give some thought to why she lost: How she blindly followed Barack Obama and traded the traditional Democratic message of working-class security for professional-class diversity financed by Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley. What Clinton and her lieutenants never realized was that the success of Obama’s message was unrelated to its content. The message worked because of the messenger. And when that messenger changed, when the suave, eloquent, dapper, youthful Obama was traded for a woman who was none of those things, the inevitable occurred. The Democrats capsized.
Yet there was Hillary Clinton on my television screen last week, where she seems to have been for, oh, the past two years. She confided to Christiane Amanpour that she is “writing” a book about her experience on the campaign trail—her ghostwriter must have a high tolerance for rationalizations. Always eager to join the cool kids, she called herself a member of the resistance. And when asked if she took responsibility for her loss, she said sure—and then proceeded to cast blame on the Russians, on James Comey, on fake news, on the Electoral College. I guess her answer depends on what the meaning of “responsibility” is. There wasn’t the faintest glimmer of an apology, the tiniest speck of self-awareness. Forget about trade, forget about the banks, forget about calling my fellow citizens deplorable, and forget about not campaigning in Wisconsin: The election was mine; it was stolen from me; I am entitled to rule.
The 2016 election will not end. Neither the president nor his opponents seem tired of bringing it up. Clinton’s non-apology apology was grist for the Trump Tweet mill: “FBI…