Clinton Offers Evidence-Free Warning to Dems: GOP Will 'Steal Votes' in 2020
I’m not a Hulu subscriber, which means I won’t be catching the new Clinton hagiography “Hillary” when it premieres in March. More’s the pity.
I can absorb the coverage during the media roll-out however, which is obviously enough. Her batting-practice interview with The Hollywood Reporter, published Tuesday, is about the level of coverage you should expect.
Takeaways: Clinton apparently loathes Bernie Sanders and believes everyone else does, too. She thinks a female candidate won’t be treated fairly and she doesn’t think she should be judged harshly for her friendship with disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.
(“How could we have known?” Hillary told The Hollywood Reporter when asked about Weinstein, who had been the subject of rumors about his predatory sexual behavior for years. “He raised money for me, for the Obamas, for Democrats in general. And that at the time was something that everybody thought made sense.”)
I can only imagine the kind of capitulations THR must have made during the negotiation process for the interview, because even the most obeisant of Hillary acolytes wouldn’t have let so many assertions go without at least some probing in the follow-up.
Here’s one exchange that, while not terribly substantive, certainly demonstrates the general tenor of Lacey Rose’s interview:
Q: You’ve grappled with whether you should have fired back more aggressively at Trump when you had the chance. Can a woman win that way in 2020?
Advertisement - story continues belowA: It’s hard still. Very hard. I thought Elizabeth did a good job [at the Jan. 14 Democratic debate] with, “The only people on this stage who have won every one of their races are Amy and me.” I thought that was clever. Some people loved it, some hated it.
Q: That’s the world we live in.
Hillary could have done this interview with Alexa on her Echo Dot and it would have been more inquisitive.
There are some advantages to this process for the observer, however, one of them being that it feels less like an interview and more like Hillary on the analyst’s couch during an intake session. She seems willing to go places she probably wouldn’t if there were an actual back-and-forth.
One of those places involves accusing the Republicans, absent of any evidence, of trying to steal votes in the 2020 election the same way she continues to say the Republicans stole votes in the 2016 election.
Just before the exchange above, Hillary was asked about the counsel she had provided to the 2020 candidates. (Bernie, for obvious reasons, excluded.)
“I always say [to the female candidates], ‘Look, you can run the best campaign, but you’re going to have to be even better than your best campaign to overcome some of the unfairness that will be directed at you as a woman,'” she said.
“Whoever gets the nomination, you’ve got to deal with the structural challenges that the Republicans and their allies have put in your way. So, that means you’ve got to deal with voter suppression, because they’ll steal votes or they’ll prevent votes from happening.”
But wait, there’s more. Hillary also said she told candidates that “[i]f your emails haven’t been stolen yet, they will be,” a curious call-back from someone who once handled classified information on a private server and thought there wasn’t a whole lot wrong with that.
She also said the candidates have “to worry about the propaganda, the fake news, the made-up stories. Now you have the additional worry of the deepfakes, and people putting words in your mouth.”
Disregarding the worrying “about the propaganda, the fake news, the made-up stories” and “the deepfakes,” it’s interesting to see Hillary present another fact-free, fact-proof accusation that the GOP is going to steal the election.
Her assertion is that the Republicans are going to “steal votes or they’ll prevent votes from happening.” This is a tired argument: The idea that Republicans are tinkering away at legislation to help them win, whether it involves purging voter rolls of inactive voters and those who filled out the registration incorrectly or legislation that requires voter ID. It’s the old Stacey Abrams theory.
The disproof of that theorem comes in the person of, well, Stacey Abrams. There is zero solid evidence that voter purges in Georgia caused her to lose — and that voter purge law was passed by a Democratic-controlled legislature, anyhow.
In terms of 2020, where are these laws being passed? Where are they targeted specifically at Democrats to throw the election the Republicans’ way? If there was a follow-up that asked about this, it’s currently lost to history. The published version of The Hollywood Reporter interview moves onto that question about how Hillary has “grappled with whether you should have fired back more aggressively at Trump.”
It’s also worth talking about the fact that, as David Rutz brought up over at The Washington Free Beacon, this was the woman who said, back when she was confident the 2016 election was hers, that the possibility of Donald Trump not accepting the results of the vote was a “direct threat to our democracy,” terming him a “sore loser.” Unfortunately for her, he didn’t lose.
But she had another explanation for that, as Rutz noted: Her claim that 80,000 voters in Wisconsin “were turned away from the polls because of the color of their skin, because of their age, because of whatever excuse could be made up to stop a fellow American citizen from voting.”
Furthermore, she claimed that, since portions of the Voting Rights Act were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013, that also played a role in her loss because in 2016, “there were fewer voters registered in Georgia than there had been those prior four years.”
The Washington Post, certainly not home to a phalanx of Trump apologists, called those claims “[w]rong on multiple levels, seriously misleading and worth a cumulative Four Pinocchios.”
When even The Washington Post didn’t give Hillary’s specific claims any truck, why should we consider her generalities more credible?
Clinton has positioned herself as the Cassandra of the 2020 election, auguring direly about nefarious plots being hatched to ensure Trump’s victory: Tulsi Gabbard is a “Russian asset” being groomed for a third-party run that would allegedly benefit the Trump campaign. Russia did everything it could to make sure Bernie Sanders stole the nomination from her (and nobody likes him, anyhow).
Now, she claims the Republicans are going to snatch the election away from whoever gets nominated.
None of these utterances receives any pushback from interviewers who take her word as gospel spoken from on high, as if even asking her to explain her assertions would be to join the other side.
Hillary’s claims all have one thing in common: They aim to cement her legacy as a wronged woman who should have been our 45th president, minimizing the reasons she lost the election while emphasizing the reasons she thinks the election was taken from her.
If you’re a Hulu subscriber, you can see all of this play out in four parts starting March 6. You can also save yourself some time, listen to her whining during the media rollout and assume that’s basically what you’ll have to endure if you watch this thing.
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