Evidently, Hillary Clinton is still bitter about the 2016 primary:
Four years since their rough Democratic primary battle, Hillary Clinton has not let up on her criticism of Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, says of Sanders in a new documentary that “nobody likes him.”
“He was in Congress for years,” Clinton says in the soon-to-be-released four-part Hulu documentary “Hillary,” The Hollywood Reporter said in a report. “He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.” [NBC News]
If this was a criticism on substantive issues, it’d be fine, but this is ad hominen and not relevant to the campaign. It makes her look bad.
But, worse, the Bernie Sanders fans, who were already embittered by the 2016 Democratic nominating scandal, as headlined by Rep Wasserman-Schulz, will not be soothed by Clinton’s remarks. If the bitterness is widespread and leads to a Trump re-election, then it won’t be hard to see Clinton as sabotaging the Democratic nominee, if it’s not Sanders, for petty and foolish reasons.
It may be unreasonable, and some might even argue unethical, for the Sanders fans to hold the entire Democratic Party responsible for the actions of Wasserman-Schulz, and even Clinton, but it’s even more unreasonable for Clinton to risk their fury at what they see as their unfair elimination in the 2016 contest. After all, their enthusiasm tends to border on a cult, albeit not as ludicrous as the Trump cult.
And for those who think is all just politics, yes, it is. It doesn’t invalidate the point, which is for the party to find a way to win. Making bitter and irrelevant remarks as a candidate who benefited from a controversial move by an ally who was in charge of the DNC at the time benefits nothing but her outrage, and hurts the chances of beating the man who beat her.
On the other hand, I continue to see a run by an Independent in the Democratic primary as being somewhat silly in itself. Either join the Democrats or don’t take up space in their primary, it’s as simple as that. I have no idea why the Democrats keep putting up with it.
Yeah, software engineers hate it when values start running around outside of their domains.
