Somewhere, Hubert Humphrey is feeling a little better about it all. What more would you need to know about Clinton than this: her final distinction as a candidate was to having the most faithless presidential electors ever.
Well, they did tell us that she’d make history…
What takes us from tragedy to farce on this, though, is that Clinton’s unhappy historical footnote came in an attempt to hurt Donald Trump.
A handful of Democrats were wedded to the idea of getting 37 Trump electors to flip, and thereby throw the contest to the House of Representatives. In the end, Trump lost two while Clinton lost five.
Woof.
It was amazing, then, that Clinton’s spokesman,
Brian Fallon, had the chutzpah to scold the faithless Clinton electors referring to their behavior as “some kind of coup.”
One of the backers of the electoral revolt was Fallon’s old boss, erstwhile Clinton campaign chairman, John “The Phisherman” Podesta. Podesta had argued that electors should receive a classified national security briefing on the extent of Russia’s efforts to influence the campaign,
an obvious effort to prejudice them against voting for Trump.
To have a spokesman complaining about unseemly coups after the gambit failed is a little too rich. After all, Clinton herself and her top spokespeople had been reinforcing the message on Russian involvement, seemingly hourly, for the past two weeks.
In the end, it not only backfired on Clinton, but robbed her of an opportunity to restore some luster to her name. Many prominent Democrats spoke out against the Electoral College shenanigans, urging Democrats to support the system even when they didn’t support its result.
Clinton passed on the chance to be an advocate for republican virtues and defender of democratic ideals in favor of hoping
maybe she might be able to shoplift a term in the White House.
It’s sort of like the Clinton campaign jumping in on the Wisconsin and Michigan recounts only to
actually find votes for Trump in Wisconsin and then accidentally expose widespread irregularities in the mostly Democratic precincts of Detroit.
Sad!
One elector who stayed, ahem, faithful was her own husband, Bill Clinton, who fulminated to reporters outside the statehouse in Albany about the unfairness of the whole campaign.
The former president may have lost a couple of steps since his heyday, but his gift for a triple bank-shot soundbite was still intact.
In one paragraph, he managed to falsely claim that his wife was “vindicated at the end” about her mishandling of state secrets by former Secretary of State Colin Powell and then still manage to pin the blame on “the Russians” and “the FBI deal.”
“She did everything else and still won by 2.8 million votes,” the former president said, and one can just imagine that bony finger when it’s squarely in the face of the assembled press corps.
But she was not vindicated. And she did not win by “2.8 million votes.” She lost by 77.
A
ll of the excuse making. All of the focus on perceived slights. All of the hubris. All of the entitlement. All right there in one Clintonian paragraph.
Whatever history’s eventual verdict on the very eventful life of the 67th secretary of state, 42nd presidential nominee of the Democratic Party and 42nd first lady, part of her story will always be that after an astonishing failure in her second presidential run, she refused to take responsibility for her own failings.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/12/20/fitting-finale-for-house-clinton.html