Michael Brendan Dougherty of National Review Online appropriates one of Barack Obama’s most infamous phrases to describe the Democratic candidate who tried to follow Obama into the White House.
Bitter clingers. The 47 percent who are takers. You’d think after Barack Obama and Mitt Romney got burned for coining these appellations, ambitious pols would learn not to talk about the opposing party’s voters that way.
Both those comments were said before private audiences and leaked out. But Hillary did them better by offering her diagnosis of the “basket of deplorables” at a public campaign event. And she refuses to learn even still. At a conference in India yesterday she confidently explained the 2016 election this way:
“I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product. . . . So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, ‘Make America Great Again,’ was looking backwards. You know: ‘You didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women, you know, getting jobs, you don’t want to, you know, see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are, whatever your problem is, I’m going to solve it.’”
The first thing to say is that this is a kind of projected fantasy. And a pandering one at that. You know middle America, with its toxic envy of people from . . . uh, India.
Although she is not running anymore, Clinton’s comments are in some ways worse than Obama’s. He attributed the bitterness in “small towns in the Midwest” to the policy failures and false promises of the Clinton and Bush years. He prefaced the remark by saying, “Each successive administration has said somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.”
Clinton’s remarks manage to combine self-pity with contempt. They are unhelpful to Democrats trying to get elected. And they articulate what is becoming the central myth of the liberal elite: We are beautiful and successful because we’re morally superior.
