Former Obama White House adviser David Axelrod is not impressed with Hillary Clinton.
When the failed presidential candidate sat down this week for an interview at the Women for Women International conference in New York, she said she accepted “absolute personal responsibility” for blowing the election to a former reality television show host. Clinton declined to name anything her campaign did wrong, and instead listed all the outside factors she blames for her election loss, including the FBI’s investigation of her unauthorized State Department homebrew server. She also blamed WikiLeaks for publishing her campaign chairman’s personal emails.
Axelrod responded Wednesday by saying he didn’t hear Clinton take responsibility for managing somehow to lose to a historically unpopular presidential candidate. Rather, he told CNN, he heard a lot of excuses.
“Jim Comey didn’t tell her not to campaign in Wisconsin after the convention. [FBI director] Jim Comey didn’t say, ‘Don’t put any resources into Michigan until the final week of the campaign,'” Axelrod told CNN. “One of the things that hindered her in the campaign was a sense that she never fully was willing to take responsibility for her mistakes, particularly that server.”
“She said the words ‘I’m responsible,’ but everything else suggested that she really doesn’t feel that way and I don’t think that helps her in the long run,” he added, suggesting that the former secretary of state just accept full responsibility and stop looking for excuses.
Clinton’s campaign committed multiple, inexcusable errors, Axelrod continued, which is evident from the fact that she lost to someone as divisive and unpopular as the GOP nominee.
“It takes a lot of work to lose to Donald Trump, let me tell you,” Axelrod said. “He was the least popular presidential candidate to win in the history of polling, and so it wasn’t just the Comey letter. The fact that she was in a position to lose because of the Comey letter is something that deserves some introspection.”
Clinton said Tuesday she recognizes there were “problems” and “shortfalls” in her campaign. She then said in the very next breath that she would be president today were it not for things like the Comey letter, which, by the way, exists only because of her unauthorized email server.
“I was on the way to winning until a combination of Jim Comey’s letter on Oct. 28th and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me but got scared off. And the evidence for that intervening event is I think compelling, persuasive,” Clinton told Amanpour.
Were it not for these outside forces, she maintained in her interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, and “if the election had been on Oct. 27th, I’d be your president.”
Missing from Clinton’s supposed acceptence of responsibility was any mention of the many campaign errors referenced by Axelrod and others.
She didn’t mention, for example, the fact that she didn’t set foot in Wisconsin once during the entire general election. She didn’t mention her team’s initial decision to frame the campaign in terms of how voters could help her (“I’m with her!”) and not vice versa. She didn’t mention her team’s mind-boggling decision to outsource part of its millennial outreach efforts to Al Gore, 69, and Dave Matthews, 50. She didn’t mention the campaign’s bizarre decision to send Lena Dunham to North Carolina. She didn’t mention the moment she claimed at a fundraiser in New York City that “half” of Trump’s supporters were “irredeemable” bigots.
Clinton also ignored all mentions of the fact her team actively ignored and took for granted disaffected white and working class voters whom Obama had won, even after Bill Clinton, who won the rust belt twice, implored them to reconsider their strategy.
But the Comey letter and Podesta emails were totally why she lost the election.
