Hillary Clinton will appear in Wisconsin this fall to promote her new book “What Happened.”
Better late than never, I guess.
Clinton’s stunning defeat last November can be attributed to several factors, but none so great as the fact her campaign neglected putatively reliably blue states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and the working-class population that had been necessary to Democratic victories. In fact, Clinton didn’t visit the Badger State once during the entire presidential campaign. Not once.
So here we are now, several months after the 2016 election, and Clinton will at long last make an appearance in Wisconsin. She will be there on Nov. 9, exactly one year since her defeat, to hawk her new book.
Better late than never.
“Hillary will pull the curtain back on a story that’s personal, raw, detailed and surprisingly funny,” said a press release regarding her upcoming book tour.
It added, “She’ll take audiences with her on a first-person journey, and bring you a highly personal perspective on what happened during the election, and what’s next. What you’ll see will be her story – Live. Her story of resilience, how to get back up after a loss, and how we can all look ahead.”
She teased her book earlier this month, releasing an excerpt recounting her memory of the second presidential debate with Trump.
Clinton wrote that she felt “incredibly uncomfortable” during the debate, as Trump paced around behind her.
“Do you stay calm, keep smiling and carry on as if he weren’t repeatedly invading your space? Or do you turn, look him in the eye and say loudly and clearly, ‘Back up you creep, get away from me?’ … I kept my cool, aided by a lifetime of dealing with men trying to throw me off,” Clinton wrote.
Whether the book is as revealing and raw as her publicist promised, and whether Clinton reveals what really went wrong with her campaign, is yet to be seen.
What we do know is that in public, Clinton has blamed everyone but herself for her loss.
She has blamed the Russians. She has blamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation for its review of her private State Department email server. She has blamed “fake news.” She has blamed misogyny. She has also blamed WikiLeaks for publishing emails stolen from Democratic National Committee staffers and from her campaign chairman, John Podesta.
She has not blamed herself, nor has she blamed her campaign’s many boneheaded missteps.
It’s uncertain whether her upcoming book will include a mea culpa for her disastrous decision to frame her campaign in terms of how voters could help her (“I’m with her!”) and not vice versa. It’s unclear whether Clinton will finally own up to the moment she claimed at a fundraiser in New York City that “half” of Trump’s supporters were “irredeemable” bigots.
It’s also uncertain whether her supposedly honest and straightforward book will mention her campaign’s insane decision not to campaign even once in Wisconsin during the general election, even after Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., showed in the Democratic primary that Rust Belt voters were none too keen on her.
By scheduling a book tour stop in Wisconsin for Nov. 9, Clinton may be signaling subtly that she recognizes her campaign’s mistake of ignoring certain traditionally blue states.
Then again, she may just be going there to sell books.
