Friday, September 8, 2017

Clinton/Book

What Happened


The WashPo has an article on some of the pages leaked from Clinton's new apologia, What Happened, and some of it about Sanders is interesting. "Clinton attacks some of Sanders's supporters for being “sexist” and suggests the Vermont senator doesn't have the Democratic Party's true interests at heart. Most notably, she also intimates that he may not have even cared that his underhanded (in her opinion) attacks on her helped Donald Trump become president." according to the writer, Aaron Blake. "But inside the measured language are some pretty harsh judgments of Sanders. She's not just suggesting he's not a Democrat; she's suggesting he doesn't truly care about the party or that he may have played a hand in electing Trump. She's suggesting he doesn't appreciate the party. She claims his attacks were out-of-bounds and unprincipled."
All this despite structuring the primary specifically against him, aided and abetted by the DNC.


Here is the section that was leaked:


Because we agreed on so much, Bernie couldn’t make an argument against me in this area on policy, so he had to resort to innuendo and impugning my character. Some of his supporters, the so-called Bernie Bros, took to harassing my supporters online. It got ugly and more than a little sexist. When I finally challenged Bernie during a debate to name a single time I changed a position or a vote because of a financial contribution, he couldn’t come up with anything. Nonetheless, his attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump’s “Crooked Hillary” campaign.
I don’t know if that bothered Bernie or not. He certainly shared my horror at the thought of Donald Trump becoming President, and I appreciate that he campaigned for me in the general election. But he isn’t a Democrat — that’s not a smear, that’s what he says. He didn’t get into the race to make sure a Democrat won the White House, he got in to disrupt the Democratic Party. He was right that Democrats needed to strengthen our focus on working families and that there’s always a danger of spending too much time courting donors because of our insane campaign finance system. He also engaged a lot of young people in the political process for the first time, which is extremely important. But I think he was fundamentally wrong about the Democratic Party — the party that brought us Social Security under Roosevelt; Medicare and Medicaid under Johnson; peace between Israel and Egypt under Carter; broad-based prosperity and a balanced budget under Clinton; and rescued the auto industry, passed health care reform, and imposed tough new rules on Wall Street under Obama. I am proud to be a Democrat and I wish Bernie were, too.

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