Six months after he dismissed the crowd at Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated victory party, John Podesta does not know if the campaign he chaired could have defeated Donald Trump.
In a wide-ranging interview with Politico published Monday, Podesta seemed uncertain that the campaign could have managed to pull off a win at all.
“We bear responsibility, and it’s a great burden and I feel it every day,” he admitted. But that general concession is where Podesta’s willingness to accept blame stopped.
“We had a lead, and that lead really substantially narrowed after Comey’s letter, and the last week of coverage, which was all about if nothing else, is this thing going to ever end?” Podesta explained, blaming former FBI director James Comey and the media for Clinton’s loss.
But, like many observers, the former lobbyist admits Clinton should have poured more efforts into Wisconsin. “My own personal view is we probably should have done more in Wisconsin; we didn’t advertise there until the very end,” Podesta said. “But you know, at the end of the day, we lost Pennsylvania anyway, and we had thrown everything we could at Pennsylvania.”
“So, it is what it is,” he continued.
Podesta pointed instead to “non-college-educated white votes” in “exurban, rural areas” who just wanted to “blow up the system.” Though he believes 60 percent of the American public was convinced that Trump was “tempermentally unfit and unqualified” to be president, 20 percent of the president’s voters believed that and cast ballots for him anyway, seeking “radical change to the system,” according to Podesta.
In Podesta’s uncertainty about whether heightened efforts in Wisconsin would have converted the state from red to blue, noting that the campaign threw “everything [it] could” at Pennsylvania and still lost the state to Trump, it appears he doesn’t actually know if Clinton could have done anything to win the election.
That may be true, but Clinton allies never fault the candidate herself. Instead, like Podesta, they point to disaffected “non-college-educated” white voters and the media. Why was the campaign incapable of courting those particular Rust Belt voters, whom President Bill Clinton had urged them to reach out to?
It was they who forced the party to nominate an unlikable, distrusted, establishment politician whose husband was impeached by the House of Representatives. Yet the silly voters, scandal-thirsty media, and inept FBI director, according to Clinton and her orbit, are responsible for her failure against one of the most beatable candidates in recent history.
It’s fair to expect those talking points to be recycled for the foreseeable future. Rather than a humble admission of inadequacy, Podesta’s hesitance to agree that putting more effort into Wisconsin could have helped Clinton win is actually an arrogant shirking of responsibility.
Broadly accepting responsibility on behalf of the campaign and conceding more effort could have been put into Wisconsin but then undermining both points by blaming external forces for Clinton’s loss is cheap. It won’t help the Democratic Party going forward either.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
