Former President Bill Clinton knows a thing or two about effective political campaigning, yet his advice and experience on what it takes to win are rumored to have been rejected by the staffers running his wife Hillary Clinton's failed 2016 campaign.
Now a new book has alleged that the former president offered up a rather explicit critique of the ineffective messaging and tactics employed by the campaign and reportedly insinuated that the campaign would even struggle to sell sex to horny military troops, according to SheKnows.
That revelation came in the new book "The Squad" from The Intercept's Ryan Grim, which documents the rise of the progressive movement among Democrats in Congress that can be fairly traced back to Democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-VT) failed presidential primary challenge against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The Intercept recently shared excerpts from the first part of Grim's book that focused on the 2016 Democratic primary contest and how the Clinton campaign sought to minimize and smear the Sanders campaign with rhetorical attacks against the senator's most ardent progressive supporters.
Derisively labeled as "Bernie Bros," supporters of Sanders were incessantly maligned by the Clinton campaign as being racist and sexist in a desperate effort to stymie the clear momentum the progressive senator had initially gained among Democratic primary voters.
"As WikiLeaks would later reveal, the Clinton campaign worked directly with Washington-based nonprofit advocacy groups -- which universally endorsed Clinton, despite their younger staff generally supporting Sanders -- to ghost-write op-eds explaining how the Sanders position on this or that issue was actually sexist or racist," Grim wrote in the book.
"To the extent that the campaign tactic moved the needle at all, it 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,'" he continued.
"Anybody following the campaign closely, however, had no effort distinguishing which candidate among the two was more progressive; the giveaway was that one of them was openly calling himself a socialist," Grim added. "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 p--sy on a troop train.'"
This is not the only alleged example of former President Clinton's frustrations aimed at the self-inflicted mistakes made by the arrogant and relatively young campaign staffers who were in charge of former Secretary of State Clinton's ultimately unsuccessful presidential bid in 2016.
ABC News reported in 2017 on excerpts of the book "Shattered" by political reporters Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen that provided an in-depth analysis of what went wrong in Clinton's "doomed campaign," which included ignoring or rejecting the experience-based advice of the candidate's husband, who had previously run multiple successful campaigns at the state and national level.
That advice reportedly included making trips to the midwestern and "Rust Belt" states that the campaign largely took for granted to reach out to potentially swayable voters even though a majority of voters in those communities were likely to vote in favor of Clinton's Republican opponent, then-businessman Donald Trump.
"He thought, these eggheads don't really know politics. They don't understand persuasion," the authors wrote of Bill Clinton in reaction to the campaign's refusal to heed his advice on voter outreach efforts. "He knew there was some power just in showing up."
In contrast to Bill Clinton having twice won a presidential election, Hillary Clinton has twice failed to match that achievement, yet despite that stunning failure, Fox News reported that President Joe Biden has tapped the former first lady, New York senator, and Cabinet secretary to play a key role in his 2024 re-election effort.
Clinton already hosted a fundraiser on behalf of Biden's campaign and reportedly has been tasked to lead voter outreach and turnout efforts aimed at women and other key constituency groups that Democrats rely heavily upon for electoral success.
