For Democrats still hoping to be the next president, Hillary Clinton has a very ominous message.
The failed presidential candidate gave a despairing, bitter speech about the 2016 election and a “crisis of democracy” Monday night, warning Democrats about the perils that destroyed her hopes and dreams: email hacks, disinformation on social media, and a rigged voting system that could work against them in the end.
Clinton also blamed voter suppression for her election loss, according to Fox News, claiming that she did not have the protection of the Voting Rights Act.
“You can run the best campaign, you can have the best plans, you can get the nomination, you can win the popular vote, and you can lose the electoral college and therefore the election,” she complained at the “In Defense of American Democracy” forum at George Washington University.
Four years later…
According to Fortune, the theme of Clinton’s speech was the “crisis of democracy,” which for Clinton and many Democrats, apparently means protecting elections from being “hacked” by Republican voters.
“I was the first person who ran for president in more than 50 years without the protection of the Voting Rights Act and let me tell you, it makes a difference,” she mourned.
The Democrat pointed to a study that found that between 27,000 and 200,000 voters in Wisconsin were turned away from the polls in 2016 for having incorrect voting information. Clinton also claimed that voter suppression impacted the 2018 midterm elections, arguing that Stacey Abrams “should be” governor of Georgia despite losing her race against Brian Kemp, and that Andrew Gillum lost a Florida gubernatorial election that was “neither free nor fair and certainly not transparent.”
For Democrats not yet discouraged by Clinton’s dirge, she further warned that Dems vying for the White House in 2020 would have their personal and campaign information “stolen and weaponized against you in the most pernicious ways,” apparently referring to the 2016 hacks of her campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails and their subsequent dissemination through WikiLeaks.
Clinton’s scapegoat
Turning to another familiar complaint, Clinton then pointed to “phony, false news stories” spreading through social media and the news, echoing complaints about disinformation from so-called “Russian trolls” that Clinton and Democrats have long imagined somehow impacted the election. The Democrat cited so-called “deep-fake” videos like the viral “Drunk Nancy Pelosi” clip and complained about social media companies like Facebook refusing to take down misleading posts, thereby enabling “Trump’s propaganda efforts.”
“The Trump campaign is already spending hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook each week to spread fake endorsements and outright lies about the Democrats,” Clinton said.
She also blamed Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for refusing to pass Democrat-backed bills to shield elections from foreign interference, and suggested that Republicans are engaged in a “deliberate and ongoing effort to undermine the integrity of our elections and silence millions of Americans.”
But nowhere in Clinton’s speech is the simple truth: Clinton didn’t lose because of phony Facebook ads, or Russian hacking, or “voter suppression.” She lost because she didn’t campaign in Wisconsin. She lost because the American people rejected her candidacy.
If Clinton really wanted to give sound advice to 2020 Democrats, she should tell them not to repeat her mistakes.
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