Hillary Clinton seems to have made her choice of post-political career: incessant unfunny whining. Consider her address to Yale University’s graduating class of 2018.
How’s this for an icebreaker? “I am thrilled for all of you, even the three of you who live in Michigan and didn’t request your absentee ballots in time.” To borrow a line from another presidential loser, Jeb Bush, “Please clap.” Of course, the idea that college students didn’t do enough to elect Clinton is laughable, but it’s also true that her campaign in the Midwest wasn’t firing on all cylinders. Her Brooklyn headquarters ordered resources out of Michigan in the campaign’s final days.
“In her speech, Clinton declared that she was not going to get political,” observed James Hohmann at the Washington Post. “Then, in the very next sentence, she said the right deserves more blame for the radicalization of American politics than the left. A minute after that, she advocated for gun control.” She went on to comment on the state of politics by referencing three books: Madeleine Albright’s Fascism: A Warning and Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom.
We share some of Clinton’s concerns about the state of politics, though we’re not so sure how many of these problems would be solved by swapping Donald Trump’s flaws for hers. At the very least, there are 10,000 voters in Michigan who concluded that she had a particular talent for making Trump look good by comparison. At this point, if Clinton really believed her own warning about the United States being “on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom,” the best thing for her to do would be to go away.
