Former President Bill Clinton said around the time of the 2016 election that his wife, Hillary Clinton’s, presidential campaign “could not sell pussy on a troop train,” according to a report.
The Intercept’s Washington, DC, bureau chief Ryan Grim reported on Clinton’s harsh comments to a friend about his wife’s campaign in his book The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution.
“Former president Bill Clinton, surveying the landscape and the ham-handed efforts at identity politics, was bereft, lamenting to a longtime friend in the fall of 2016 that Hillary’s campaign ‘could not sell pussy on a troop train,’” Grim wrote in an excerpt from the book published on the Intercept on December 5.
The excerpt, dubbed “The Rise and (First) Fall of Bernie,” chronicles the 2016 Democrat primary fight between Clinton and progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), where Sanders nearly upended Clinton’s general election aspirations with a grassroots coalition.
In the excerpt, Grim recounts how Clinton’s campaign — turning to identity politics to take on a surging Sanders — “worked directly with Washington-based nonprofit advocacy groups… to ghost-write op-eds explaining how the Sanders position on this or that issue was actually sexist or racist.”
Grim says the strategy “likely pushed moderate voters paying only marginal attention to the campaign toward Sanders, who spoke like a normal person while Clinton began ascending into what her ally James Carville would later call ‘faculty lounge speak.'”
In other words, Clinton, whose campaign was led by Robby Mook, had embraced the jargon of the leftist elite, causing a disconnect with the average voter — while Sanders’s more simplistic rhetoric resonated more with voters.
Later in the general election, this strategy would seem to lead Clinton to cast half of then-candidate Donald Trump’s supporters as people who could be tossed into “the basket of deplorables.”
“The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up,” she added, per Time.
And while the campaign was concerned with identity politics, Bill Clinton had warned repeatedly about the need to appeal to white working-class voters, Politico noted, pleas that fell on deaf ears:
But in general, Bill Clinton’s viewpoint of fighting for the working class white voters was often dismissed with a hand wave by senior members of the team as a personal vendetta to win back the voters who elected him, from a talented but aging politician who simply refused to accept the new Democratic map. At a meeting ahead of the convention at which aides presented to both Clintons the “Stronger Together” framework for the general election, senior strategist Joel Benenson told the former president bluntly that the voters from West Virginia were never coming back to his party.
As Democrats have further descended into the party of “wokeness” in the seven years since then, West Virginia has turned increasingly red, evidenced by Gov. Jim Justice (R-WV) flipping parties from Democrat to Republican at a Trump rally in 2017 and Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) decision not to seek another term. Justice notably announced a bid for Manchin’s seat and regularly polled far ahead of him before the moderate Democrat opted not to seek reelection.
