Hillary Clinton's book about the 2016 election, "What Happened," was published today. It's clear from interviews and excerpts that Clinton at least partially blames Bernie Sanders for her loss.
Here are highlights of her quotes bashing Bernie, from her book, an interview with CBS, the podcast Pod Save America and NPR.
From her book:
- "Bernie... had to resort to innuendo and impugning my character."
- "Bernie Sanders, who loved to talk about how 'true progressives' never bow to political realities or powerful interests, had long bowed to the political reality of his rural state of Vermont and supported the NRA's key priorities, including voting against the Brady Bill five times in the 1990s."
- "When I finally challenged Bernie during a debate to name a single time I changed a position or a vote because of a financial contribution, he couldn't come up with anything. Nonetheless, his attacks caused lasting damage..."
- "I didn't get the same respect from my primary opponent. And a lot of his supporters continued to harrass and really go after my supporters all the time. And that feeds in, I think, to the whole sexism and misogyny of this campaign."
- "Bernie's not a Democrat. And that's not a slam, that's what he says himself. I think a lot of what he churned up in the primary campaign was very hurtful in the general election against me..."
- "His claims which he could not defend... filled up a lot of space. When I was running against President Obama in 2008, we had differences but they were, this is my bias, honest differences that we presented and we defended... That was not possible in this primary campaign."
- "[I]t was much more challenging to have a straight forward argument of 'okay health care what are we going to do about healthcare' because he would say, 'oh we're going to do single payer' and I'd say 'well, how are you going to do it' and he wouldn't know."
To NPR:
- "He's not supporting Democrats now... I won by four million votes. That's a landslide. I won, really, by March and April. But he just kept going, and he and his followers' attacks on me kept getting more and more personal, despite him asking me not to attack him personally."
- "[I]t's absolutely true that between the consistent pounding on me, first by Bernie Sanders, but more consistently by his supporters, and the theme that Trump stuck with, it really was hard to break out from under that."
- "And we saw a lot of that during the primaries from Sanders supporters, really quite vile attacks online against women who spoke out for me..."