It would be wrong to say Hillary Clinton is back in the news cycle this week, because she never left it.
She has been a constant, nagging presence in the media and politics scene since she lost the 2016 election to President Trump, and there is no sign that she plans to retire any time soon to her home in Chappaqua, New York.
On Thursday, for example, Clinton playfully teased whether she would consider a vice-presidential run.
“I never say never because I do believe in serving my country,” she said.
This is basically exactly what the former secretary of state said in November when she claimed she was receiving phone call after phone call urging her to jump into the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.
“As I say, never, never, never say never,” Clinton said. “I will certainly tell you, I’m under enormous pressure from many, many, many people to think about it.”
Clinton also weighed in this week on the Senate voting to acquit Trump, because the one thing everyone needed this week following the vote was to hear from the failed candidate Trump defeated in 2016.
“As the president’s impeachment trial began, Republican senators pledged an oath to defend the Constitution,” Clinton said Wednesday. “Today, 52 of them voted to betray that oath — and all of us. We’re entering dangerous territory for our democracy. It’ll take all of us working together to restore it.”
Earlier, in an interview on Jan. 31, Clinton attacked Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and his supporters, claiming they are partly responsible for her electoral loss.
“There was no question [in 2016] about who was going to be the [Democratic] nominee,” she said. “But unfortunately, you know, [Sanders’s] campaign and his principal supporters were just very difficult and really, constantly not just attacking me but my supporters … it had an impact.”
This was just the latest in a series of criticisms Clinton has directed recently at the Vermont lawmaker.
“All the way up until the end, a lot of people highly identified with his campaign were urging people to vote third-party, urging people not to vote,” she said last month of Sanders’s support. “That cannot happen again.”
Earlier than that, Clinton complained in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter that Sanders said in 2016 that she was “unqualified” to be president.
And even earlier than that, the failed presidential candidate groused in yet another interview that “nobody” likes Sanders, who is polling in second place in the 2020 Democratic primary.
“Nobody likes him,” Clinton said of the senator who defeated her in 23 states during the 2016 Democratic primary, “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.”
These are examples drawn from just the last two months. There is much, much more where this comes from since the last presidential election. It has been nonstop from Clinton, her shoehorning her way into the news cycle with her constant complaints and grievances.
What purpose, at this point, does Clinton serve? Does she want to hold office again? Does she want to be loved?
No.
The answer seems to be no more complicated than this: After spending most of her professional life feeling sorry for herself, claiming to be the victim of various “vast” conspiracies, Clinton does not know how to do anything else.
She is like Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite, reminiscing obsessively about that One Big Game where she was neither the winning nor the losing quarterback.
Only with Clinton, it is decidedly more pathetic.
