The Hot Screen is no great fan of Hillary Clinton — but the various yelps and whines of outrage over her temerity for writing a book about the 2016 campaign are godawfully absurd, if also fully expected and potent reminders of the irrational Hillary-hatred that suffused so much of the coverage of the presidential race. For us, most telling are the glaringly-visible double-standards when criticisms of Clinton are stacked next to the daily depredations of the man she beat by almost 3 million votes — as if Hillary’s election missteps can at this point be reasonably compared to the actual policies this clown of a president has actually implemented. It is a classic case of comparing apples and orange hair.
As Michelle Goldberg notes at Slate, one question recurs in the land of punditry: “Will [Clinton] accept total and unconditional responsibility for our current calamity?” We would add that some variation of this question has also played out in the progressive electorate at large, among which we would guess that nearly every voter has at one time or another had at least a flash of resentment toward Clinton for letting us down. But as incisive observers had already noted before What Happened was published, any explanation that puts an inordinate amount of blame on Clinton inevitably ends up downplaying and even discrediting the complementary explanations for what factors came together in 2016 to result in the election of Donald Trump. All national elections are complicated; but this last one was clearly a humdinger on the complexity scale, and it seems quite a stretch to say that Hillary’s inadequacy was the overriding reason she lost.
There is also a twisted illogic to the blame-Hillary game, in that the very people who are so concerned that she personally doomed her campaign are almost invariably people who actually WANTED HER TO WIN over Donald Trump, and who are disappointed that she did not. It’s worth noting that a case can be made that too much blaming Hillary, along with Clinton’s own decision to keep clear of the public eye, very well may have already been counterproductive to pressing forward a progressive agenda since Donald Trump’s election. There seems to have been a collective decision, born out of some combination of shock, horror, and masochism, for the left to downplay the fact that Hillary Clinton won the election by nearly 3 million votes. With so many Americans feeling victimized by the election of Donald Trump, the last thing many people wanted to do was consider Hillary Clinton to be an even bigger victim than themselves.
As the Hot Screen has written before, the extremism of our political moment requires us to sometimes defer to a cold, ruthless approach to our politics and our political assumptions. When the losing candidate of the most significant election of our lifetimes writes a memoir about what she thinks is important about the election, we all need to pay attention, regardless of our personal feelings about this candidate and our assumptions and conclusions to date of what transpired. There will be lessons to learn from what she’s written, even if it takes an effort to separate the wheat from the chaff — an effort necessary when reading the writing of ANY politician, damned or sainted alike.
