Bill Clinton (Credit Joyce Naltchayan/Agence France Presse/Getty Images)
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. (Read more: Breitbart, 12/16/2023) (Archive)