Hillary Clinton just won’t go away.
And the two-time loser is intent on mucking up the 2020 race for the Democrat presidential nomination, still bitter over Sen. Bernie Sanders’ tough run against her in 2016. Like a miffed high school girl, she recently said of Sanders, “nobody likes him.”
Appearing on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” on Thursday, Clinton threw some more shade at Sanders, saying voters need to pick a candidate who “can actually win” against President Trump.
“I say two things,” Clinton said. “I say, vote for the person who you believe can actually win in November. And the person who you think can govern our country. Because somebody has to get in there and try to bring our country together and put us on the right track into the future and restore our democracy and our standing in the world.”
“Who do you think can win?” she asked the studio audience. “Because if you don’t win, you can’t govern. And who can best govern at a very difficult time in American history.”
Even though she never said Sanders’ name, it was clear she was talking about him.
“I am saying the same thing to everybody,” Clinton said. “Please, look at the candidates and clearly, you like somebody better than others, and then analyze that person’s positions, and their message, and can that person win. Because remember, it’s not the popular vote, it’s the electoral college.”
“You’ve got to be very clear-minded about who can win,” she added. “But it’s not enough to win, you want somebody who, as you rightly said, is going to try to get us back on track. We have so much to be proud of in our country. We have so many wonderful people. We need to get back into what I call, ‘The Future Business.’ We need to be investing in our future. It means dealing with climate change. It means dealing with healthcare. It means making the economy work for everybody. These things are not easy to do. So you need somebody who knows how to govern. And I just want everybody to pay attention.”
“If you promise the moon and you can’t deliver the moon, then that’s going to be one more indicator of how we just can’t trust each other,” she said. Sanders, of course, is famous for offering free everything to everybody, from free health care to free college.
Clinton has badmouthed Sanders before. “He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it,” Hillary said in a new documentary about Sanders.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, published last week, she was asked if she would endorse Sanders and campaign for him if he wins the nomination. “I’m not going to go there yet,” she said. “We’re still in a very vigorous primary season.”
Then she returned to bashing one of the top candidates for the 2020 nomination.
“I will say, however, that it’s not only him, it’s the culture around him,” Clinton said. “It’s his leadership team. It’s his prominent supporters. It’s his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women.”
“And I really hope people are paying attention to that because it should be worrisome that he has permitted this culture — not only permitted, [he] seems to really be very much supporting it,” she added.
Sanders and Clinton were fierce foes in the 2016 campaign. Hillary later complained that Sanders didn’t drop out of the race quickly enough, hurting her campaign in the general election. She also claimed he didn’t support her in the race against Trump, even though he traveled the country to campaign for her.
For his part, Sanders charged that the Democratic National Committee colluded with Clinton to help her win the nomination.
“If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead,” Donna Brazile, the former DNC interim chairwoman, wrote in November 2016, days after the election.
“This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity,” she said, adding that while it may not have been illegal, “it sure looked unethical.”
Everything from the primary and debate schedule to the excessive power of super-delegates helped Clinton secure the nomination, even though Sanders was drawing far larger crowds and had massive support from all wings of the party. Even Brazile, for all her honesty about what happened to Bernie, helped her longtime friend Hillary: At one point, the former CNN contributor delivered the network’s prepared questions to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign just before a crucial primary debate.
Last February, Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign spokesman, Michael Briggs, called Team Clinton the “biggest a**holes in American politics.” He also called Clinton’s staff “total ingrates” for complaining about the use of private planes, which he said was the only way Sanders could get to campaign events in time.
And he didn’t mince words.
“You can see why she’s one of the most disliked politicians in America,” Briggs said. “She’s not nice. Her people are not nice. [Mr. Sanders] busted his tail to fly all over the country to talk about why it made sense to elect Hillary Clinton and the thanks that [we] get is this kind of petty stupid sniping a couple years after the fact.”
