All this time many political observers have believed that Hillary Clinton, itching to remain relevant, has been mulling another run at the White House in 2020. While that may still in fact be so, no one has taken the time to ponder how a Hillary left on the sidelines against her will would react as the show went on without her. We are beginning to find out.
Ex-staffers of Hillary's doomed 2016 campaign slammed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the man their candidate genuinely feels cost her the election. With Sanders running again as a progressive populist claiming to be in touch with the working class, the Clintonite attack was calculated to cause maximum political damage.
Bashing the Bern
Former Hillary aide Zac Petkanes took a jab at the Sanders campaign’s support of Clinton, as Politico reports:
"I'm not shocked that while thousands of volunteers braved the heat and cold to knock on doors until their fingers bled in a desperate effort to stop Donald Trump, his Royal Majesty King Bernie Sanders would only deign to leave his plush D.C. office or his brand new second home on the lake if he was flown around on a cushy private jet like a billionaire master of the universe."
He wasn’t alone. “We would try to fight it as much as possible because of cost and availability of planes, but they would request [a jet] every time,” another ex-Hillary source told Politico. "We would always try to push for commercial. ... At the campaign, you’re constantly trying to save like 25 cents."
Bernie Sanders
Ouch. Painting socialist Sanders as a pampered jet-setter is about the worst way you could hurt his campaign, which of course is exactly what these former Clintonites were trying to do. And there is no doubt that their hostility directly reflects on their old boss. Hillary has shown repeatedly since her bitter defeat to President Trump that she has deep-seated contempt for Sanders and his upstart challenge to her carefully scripted Dem coronation.
Clintons Don't Forget
The leftist website Vox ran a lengthy article in 2017 detailing all the disparaging remarks Hillary aimed at Bernie in her new book What Happened, which was touted as the inside story on her crushing loss. The remarks show a sullen and spiteful side of Clinton that it appears we will be seeing more of as Sanders takes a second stab at the brass ring.
Decrying Sanders' shots at her Wall Street financial backing, Hillary wrote:
"Because we agreed on so much, Bernie couldn’t make an argument against me in this area on policy, so he had to resort to innuendo and impugning my character... His attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump’s 'Crooked Hillary' campaign. I don’t know if that bothered Bernie or not."
The anger is palpable in that prose. Clinton also resented the fact that Sanders fought on gamely instead of dropping his sword at her feet earlier in the nomination process. "The delegate math hadn’t been in question since March, but Bernie had hung on to the bitter end, drawing blood wherever he could along the way," she wrote.
Hillary is most definitely taking this personal. Here's more. "It was beyond frustrating that Bernie acted as if he had a monopoly on political purity and that he had set himself up as the sole arbiter of what it meant to be progressive…."
Hillary Clinton
There's certainly no love lost on the other side as well. Michael Briggs, ex-spokesman for Sanders' 2016 campaign, told Politico that the Clinton staffers were "toxic ingrates" to attack Bernie after he helped get out the vote for Hillary and as he was preparing a fresh run of his own. “You can see why she's one of the most disliked politicians in America," Briggs added, revealing that the Bernie Bros hold Hillary accountable for the renewed assault on their man. "It doesn't make me feel good to feel this way but they're some of the biggest a--holes in American politics," he huffed about Team Hillary.
Amid an already heavily crowded field of potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, you will not see a single figure hurrying to garner favor with Hillary, whose brand is pure poison these days. And that absolutely rubs her the wrong way. We have just seen how vicious a vindictive Hillary can be with this precision bombing of the nascent 2020 Sanders campaign. Other candidates will avoid her like the plague but they may very well now be wondering if she will turn her guns against them too if they gain any traction in the race. After all, they are freezing her out – and taking the high road has never been a Clinton trait.
