http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign...d-by-bickering
Hillary Clinton’s revenge tour and Nikki Haley’s ascent
Democratic nominee blames her loss on misogyny, but strong women are undeterred
By Tammy Bruce - - Wednesday, April 12, 2017
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Hillary Clinton has emerged from the woods determining that her election loss is everyone’s fault but her own. But even more surprising was that Donald Trump colluding with the Russians was suddenly no longer the main culprit; no, now it was hatred of women that fueled her loss. But this was no ordinary misogyny, it was the fault of women in particular who apparently hate other women. Or something.
In fact, if there’s a misogynist in this story, it’s Hillary Clinton.
Mrs. Clinton spoke about her forthcoming book to The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof at the Women in the World Summit in New York, in which she will explain it was misogyny, the FBI’s James B. Comey, WikiLeaks and Russia that did her in.
In other words, a book of fiction blaming everyone except herself.
Mr. Kristof dutifully asked her about the impact misogyny had on the election, handing her the plate she required to indirectly riff on how those who did not vote for her are bad, mean people.
“I’m currently writing a book where I spend a lot of time wrestling with this,” she noted. “As you might guess, I’ve thought about it more than once. I don’t know that there is one answer. It is fair to say that certainly misogyny played a role. That just has to be admitted.”
At one point Mr. Kristof directly asks Mrs. Clinton who she blames for her loss. Her simple answer confirms a mindset that has removed herself entirely from the equation, while placing everyone else at the fulcrum: “How much time do you have?”
The fact of the matter is this: The people who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton like women just fine, but they didn’t like one in particular — her. It was her patronizing sanctimony that repulsed people, yes, including women, during a campaign now returning as a charged-up revenge tour.
Mrs. Clinton holds herself up as a lesson for girls and women in the damage misogyny can do. And she’s right, but the perpetrators are not the women who voted their conscience last year.
The ultimate in misogyny is stripping women of their agency, of their self-worth. By excusing her self-inflicted failure on the deeds of others, Mrs. Clinton is telling women nothing they do matters; their choices are irrelevant; their own decisions are meaningless. In Hillary’s world, women are at the mercy of the environment, like a piece of driftwood in the sea.
And yet this woman, victimized by so much, still insists she coulda, woulda, shoulda, been president.
Are women impacted by the actions of others? Of course we are. Our lives are more complex and the issues we face at home and in the workplace must be continually challenged. Women who succeed recognize that it is our choices that make the difference on both what we offer and what we overcome.
Instead, Mrs. Clinton relies on old feminist tropes, unable to face her own failures. She took for granted her base of support. She presumed she was owed the votes of a certain type of person and then felt comfortable ignoring them. She ran a campaign of vengeance and entitlement, while promoting an agenda that would further the economic destruction of the country and ignored our increasingly perilous national security.
Hillary Clinton lost because she’s Hillary Clinton. She lost because she never set foot in Wisconsin. She lost because she lied. She lost because of her horrible judgment and a resentment of, well, everyone.
She lost because she ran a campaign where she was the one who was to be elevated and lauded, when that is usually reserved for the American electorate.
She made herself the point, when the point was the United States. She lost because, like most politicians, she viewed the American people as obstacles to overcome, not people to get to know.
As Hillary was rolling out her revenge tour last week, there was another woman emerging as the breakout star of the Trump administration. Nimrata Randhawa (also known as Nikki Haley), our ambassador to the United Nations. Mrs. Haley was schooling the world body and U.N. Security Council specifically about the horrors of the Syrian chemical weapons attack on opponents of President Bashar Assad’s regime.
Mrs. Haley, a former governor of South Carolina with no international diplomatic experience, was viewed suspiciously when first named to the post. Critics, including this columnist, were concerned about her lack of a resume on the serious issues besetting the world. How could someone, with no background at all in international politics and diplomacy, handle the pit that is the U.N.?
Those concerns no longer exist after her virtuoso handling of an international crisis, replete with chemical weapons, mass murder, terrorist groups, Russia and Iran. Mrs. Haley was an iron fist in a velvet glove. She did not bend, she controlled the environment, and led.
We can all presume there is an overwhelming amount of misogyny at the U.N. Mrs. Haley is likely dealing with it every day, and yet everyone at the U.N. now knows who is in charge. And it’s not the boys from Syria, Russia or Iran.
If we’re looking for role models for women, the best choice is to look to women who find their power inside, own their choices and forge onward, not to those who insult us all by insisting we’re all victims, at the perpetual mercy of others.
• Tammy Bruce, author and Fox News contributor, is a radio talk show host.
Clinton campaign plagued by bickering
By Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes - 04/12/17 06:00 AM EDT
The following is an excerpt adapted from “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,” which will be released on April 18. Copyright © 2017 by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. Published by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
‘We Got An Ass-Chewing’
Hillary was so mad she couldn’t think straight. She was supposed to be focused on the prep session for that night’s Univision debate in Miami, but a potent mix of exhaustion and exasperation bubbled up inside.
She’d been humiliated in the Michigan primary the night before, a loss that not only robbed her of a prime opportunity to put Bernie Sanders down for good but also exposed several of her weaknesses. How could she have been left so vulnerable? She knew — or at least she thought she did. The blame belonged to her campaign team, she believed, for failing to hone her message, energize important constituencies and take care of business in getting voters to the polls. And now, Jake Sullivan, her de facto chief strategist, was giving her lip about the last answer she’d delivered in the prep session.
“That’s not very good,” Sullivan corrected.
“Really?” Hillary snapped back.
The room fell silent.
“Why don’t you do it?”
The comment was pointed and sarcastic, but she meant it. So for the next 30 minutes, there he was, pretending to be Hillary while she critiqued his performance.
Every time the Yale lawyer and former high school debate champ opened his mouth, Hillary cut him off. “That isn’t very good,” she’d say. “You can do better.” Then she’d hammer him with a Bernie line.
It wasn’t just Sullivan in her crosshairs. She let everyone on her team have it that day. “We haven’t made our case,” she fumed. “We haven’t framed the choice. We haven’t done the politics.”
“She was visibly, unflinchingly pissed off at us as a group,” said one aide who was in the room for the humiliating scene. “And she let us know she felt that way.”
Hillary had been up into the wee hours the night before, agitating over her loss. This is because we made poor choices about where we traveled, she thought. She emailed Robby Mook to tell him she believed she’d spent too much time in the cities of Detroit and Flint and not enough in the working-class white suburbs around them. Sensing just how angry she was, Mook responded by putting together a morning conference call so that Hillary could vent. But that didn’t settle her; if anything, it left her more perplexed and angry, as her debate-prep team witnessed firsthand.
Her aides took the browbeating — one of several she delivered in person and on the phone that day — in silence. They had a lot of their own thoughts on what went wrong, some of which echoed Hillary’s assessment: her message was off for Michigan, and she had refused to go hard against trade; Mook had pinched pennies and failed to put organizers on the ground; the polling and analytics were a touch too rosy, meaning the campaign didn’t know Bernie was ahead; she had set up an ambiguous decisionmaking structure on the campaign; and she’d focused too heavily on black and brown voters at the expense of competing for the whites who had formed her base in 2008. The list went on and on.
The underlying truth — the one that many didn’t want to admit to themselves — was the person ultimately responsible for these decisions, the one whose name was on the ticket, hadn’t corrected these problems, all of which had been brought to her attention before primary day. She’d stuck with the plan, and it had cost her.
While the campaign projected a *drama-free tenor, it was reminiscent of other moments of frustration.
Months earlier, Hillary Clinton turned her fury on her consultants and campaign aides, blaming them for a failure to focus the media on her platform.
In her ear the whole time, spurring her on to cast blame on others and never admit to anything, was her husband. Neither Clinton could accept the simple fact that Hillary had hamstrung her own campaign and dealt the most serious blow to her own presidential aspirations.
That state of denial would become more obvious than ever to her top aides and consultants during one conference call in the thick of the public discussion of her server. Joel Benenson, Mandy Grunwald, Jim Margolis, John Anzalone, John Podesta, Mook, Huma Abedin and Dan Schwerin were among the small coterie who huddled in Abedin’s mostly bare corner office overlooking the East River at the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters. Hillary and Bill, who rarely visited, joined them by phone.
Hillary’s severe, controlled voice crackled through the line first. It carried the sound of a disappointed teacher or mother delivering a lecture before a whipping. That back end was left to Bill, who lashed out with abandon. Eyes cast downward, stomachs turning — both from the scare tactics and from their own revulsion at being chastised for Hillary’s failures — Hillary’s talented and accomplished team of professionals and loyalists simply took it. There was no arguing with Bill Clinton.
You haven’t buried this thing, the ruddy-cheeked former president rasped. You haven’t figured out how to get Hillary’s core message to the voters. This has been dragging on for months, he thundered, and nothing you’ve done has made a damn bit of difference. Voters want to hear about Hillary’s plans for the economy, and you’re not making that happen. Now, do your damn jobs.
“We got an ass-chewing,” one of the participants recalled months later.
Hillary came back on the line to close the lecture. It was hard to tell what was worse — getting hollered at by Bill or getting scolded by the stern and self-righteous Hillary. Neither was pleasant. You heard him, she admonished. “Get it straight.”
By Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes - 04/12/17 06:00 AM EDT
The following is an excerpt adapted from “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,” which will be released on April 18. Copyright © 2017 by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. Published by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
‘We Got An Ass-Chewing’
Hillary was so mad she couldn’t think straight. She was supposed to be focused on the prep session for that night’s Univision debate in Miami, but a potent mix of exhaustion and exasperation bubbled up inside.
She’d been humiliated in the Michigan primary the night before, a loss that not only robbed her of a prime opportunity to put Bernie Sanders down for good but also exposed several of her weaknesses. How could she have been left so vulnerable? She knew — or at least she thought she did. The blame belonged to her campaign team, she believed, for failing to hone her message, energize important constituencies and take care of business in getting voters to the polls. And now, Jake Sullivan, her de facto chief strategist, was giving her lip about the last answer she’d delivered in the prep session.
“That’s not very good,” Sullivan corrected.
“Really?” Hillary snapped back.
The room fell silent.
“Why don’t you do it?”
The comment was pointed and sarcastic, but she meant it. So for the next 30 minutes, there he was, pretending to be Hillary while she critiqued his performance.
Every time the Yale lawyer and former high school debate champ opened his mouth, Hillary cut him off. “That isn’t very good,” she’d say. “You can do better.” Then she’d hammer him with a Bernie line.
It wasn’t just Sullivan in her crosshairs. She let everyone on her team have it that day. “We haven’t made our case,” she fumed. “We haven’t framed the choice. We haven’t done the politics.”
“She was visibly, unflinchingly pissed off at us as a group,” said one aide who was in the room for the humiliating scene. “And she let us know she felt that way.”
Hillary had been up into the wee hours the night before, agitating over her loss. This is because we made poor choices about where we traveled, she thought. She emailed Robby Mook to tell him she believed she’d spent too much time in the cities of Detroit and Flint and not enough in the working-class white suburbs around them. Sensing just how angry she was, Mook responded by putting together a morning conference call so that Hillary could vent. But that didn’t settle her; if anything, it left her more perplexed and angry, as her debate-prep team witnessed firsthand.
Her aides took the browbeating — one of several she delivered in person and on the phone that day — in silence. They had a lot of their own thoughts on what went wrong, some of which echoed Hillary’s assessment: her message was off for Michigan, and she had refused to go hard against trade; Mook had pinched pennies and failed to put organizers on the ground; the polling and analytics were a touch too rosy, meaning the campaign didn’t know Bernie was ahead; she had set up an ambiguous decisionmaking structure on the campaign; and she’d focused too heavily on black and brown voters at the expense of competing for the whites who had formed her base in 2008. The list went on and on.
The underlying truth — the one that many didn’t want to admit to themselves — was the person ultimately responsible for these decisions, the one whose name was on the ticket, hadn’t corrected these problems, all of which had been brought to her attention before primary day. She’d stuck with the plan, and it had cost her.
While the campaign projected a *drama-free tenor, it was reminiscent of other moments of frustration.
Months earlier, Hillary Clinton turned her fury on her consultants and campaign aides, blaming them for a failure to focus the media on her platform.
In her ear the whole time, spurring her on to cast blame on others and never admit to anything, was her husband. Neither Clinton could accept the simple fact that Hillary had hamstrung her own campaign and dealt the most serious blow to her own presidential aspirations.
That state of denial would become more obvious than ever to her top aides and consultants during one conference call in the thick of the public discussion of her server. Joel Benenson, Mandy Grunwald, Jim Margolis, John Anzalone, John Podesta, Mook, Huma Abedin and Dan Schwerin were among the small coterie who huddled in Abedin’s mostly bare corner office overlooking the East River at the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters. Hillary and Bill, who rarely visited, joined them by phone.
Hillary’s severe, controlled voice crackled through the line first. It carried the sound of a disappointed teacher or mother delivering a lecture before a whipping. That back end was left to Bill, who lashed out with abandon. Eyes cast downward, stomachs turning — both from the scare tactics and from their own revulsion at being chastised for Hillary’s failures — Hillary’s talented and accomplished team of professionals and loyalists simply took it. There was no arguing with Bill Clinton.
You haven’t buried this thing, the ruddy-cheeked former president rasped. You haven’t figured out how to get Hillary’s core message to the voters. This has been dragging on for months, he thundered, and nothing you’ve done has made a damn bit of difference. Voters want to hear about Hillary’s plans for the economy, and you’re not making that happen. Now, do your damn jobs.
“We got an ass-chewing,” one of the participants recalled months later.
Hillary came back on the line to close the lecture. It was hard to tell what was worse — getting hollered at by Bill or getting scolded by the stern and self-righteous Hillary. Neither was pleasant. You heard him, she admonished. “Get it straight.”
Hillary Clinton’s revenge tour and Nikki Haley’s ascent
Democratic nominee blames her loss on misogyny, but strong women are undeterred
By Tammy Bruce - - Wednesday, April 12, 2017
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Hillary Clinton has emerged from the woods determining that her election loss is everyone’s fault but her own. But even more surprising was that Donald Trump colluding with the Russians was suddenly no longer the main culprit; no, now it was hatred of women that fueled her loss. But this was no ordinary misogyny, it was the fault of women in particular who apparently hate other women. Or something.
In fact, if there’s a misogynist in this story, it’s Hillary Clinton.
Mrs. Clinton spoke about her forthcoming book to The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof at the Women in the World Summit in New York, in which she will explain it was misogyny, the FBI’s James B. Comey, WikiLeaks and Russia that did her in.
In other words, a book of fiction blaming everyone except herself.
Mr. Kristof dutifully asked her about the impact misogyny had on the election, handing her the plate she required to indirectly riff on how those who did not vote for her are bad, mean people.
“I’m currently writing a book where I spend a lot of time wrestling with this,” she noted. “As you might guess, I’ve thought about it more than once. I don’t know that there is one answer. It is fair to say that certainly misogyny played a role. That just has to be admitted.”
At one point Mr. Kristof directly asks Mrs. Clinton who she blames for her loss. Her simple answer confirms a mindset that has removed herself entirely from the equation, while placing everyone else at the fulcrum: “How much time do you have?”
The fact of the matter is this: The people who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton like women just fine, but they didn’t like one in particular — her. It was her patronizing sanctimony that repulsed people, yes, including women, during a campaign now returning as a charged-up revenge tour.
Mrs. Clinton holds herself up as a lesson for girls and women in the damage misogyny can do. And she’s right, but the perpetrators are not the women who voted their conscience last year.
The ultimate in misogyny is stripping women of their agency, of their self-worth. By excusing her self-inflicted failure on the deeds of others, Mrs. Clinton is telling women nothing they do matters; their choices are irrelevant; their own decisions are meaningless. In Hillary’s world, women are at the mercy of the environment, like a piece of driftwood in the sea.
And yet this woman, victimized by so much, still insists she coulda, woulda, shoulda, been president.
Are women impacted by the actions of others? Of course we are. Our lives are more complex and the issues we face at home and in the workplace must be continually challenged. Women who succeed recognize that it is our choices that make the difference on both what we offer and what we overcome.
Instead, Mrs. Clinton relies on old feminist tropes, unable to face her own failures. She took for granted her base of support. She presumed she was owed the votes of a certain type of person and then felt comfortable ignoring them. She ran a campaign of vengeance and entitlement, while promoting an agenda that would further the economic destruction of the country and ignored our increasingly perilous national security.
Hillary Clinton lost because she’s Hillary Clinton. She lost because she never set foot in Wisconsin. She lost because she lied. She lost because of her horrible judgment and a resentment of, well, everyone.
She lost because she ran a campaign where she was the one who was to be elevated and lauded, when that is usually reserved for the American electorate.
She made herself the point, when the point was the United States. She lost because, like most politicians, she viewed the American people as obstacles to overcome, not people to get to know.
As Hillary was rolling out her revenge tour last week, there was another woman emerging as the breakout star of the Trump administration. Nimrata Randhawa (also known as Nikki Haley), our ambassador to the United Nations. Mrs. Haley was schooling the world body and U.N. Security Council specifically about the horrors of the Syrian chemical weapons attack on opponents of President Bashar Assad’s regime.
Mrs. Haley, a former governor of South Carolina with no international diplomatic experience, was viewed suspiciously when first named to the post. Critics, including this columnist, were concerned about her lack of a resume on the serious issues besetting the world. How could someone, with no background at all in international politics and diplomacy, handle the pit that is the U.N.?
Those concerns no longer exist after her virtuoso handling of an international crisis, replete with chemical weapons, mass murder, terrorist groups, Russia and Iran. Mrs. Haley was an iron fist in a velvet glove. She did not bend, she controlled the environment, and led.
We can all presume there is an overwhelming amount of misogyny at the U.N. Mrs. Haley is likely dealing with it every day, and yet everyone at the U.N. now knows who is in charge. And it’s not the boys from Syria, Russia or Iran.
If we’re looking for role models for women, the best choice is to look to women who find their power inside, own their choices and forge onward, not to those who insult us all by insisting we’re all victims, at the perpetual mercy of others.
• Tammy Bruce, author and Fox News contributor, is a radio talk show host.
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