Hillary Clinton says Bernie Sanders caused ‘lasting damage’ in book
Blame game or not, this is pretty much true.
Honestly I think her framing of the whole thing is pretty wrong. Bernie was just offering the same policies you’d expect him to offer regardless of Hillary’s positions – the fact that his positions were sometimes simply more generous versions of hers pointed more to the fact that there wasn’t a whole lot of ideological difference between them on those issues. And this could just as easily be described as Bernie “pulling Hillary to the left” – Hillary offering milder versions of Bernie’s spicy entrees in order to appeal to a broader audience. In fact, I personally feel that does better describe the situation.
Bernie also repeatedly came to Hillary’s aid by taking the high road – loudly and memorably refusing to entertain the e-mail “issue” when there were real policies to be discussed, and giving her a heartfelt, sincere, impassioned endorsement at the convention. And his supporters moved to supporting Hillary at a faster rate than Hillary’s moved to Obama, so if Bernie’s supporters were being unreasonable, at least they were less unreasonable than Hillary’s.
Yes, I thought he ran his campaign far too long, when it was clear he’d lost on Super Tuesday (if not before), but again that’s not really any different than Hillary’s 2008 run, when she also effectively lost on Super Tuesday and created the (dumb) tradition of “going all the way to the convention in spite of math”. And she doesn’t take into account at all that so many of the most vocal “Bernie supporters” were actually Republican operatives and weren’t going to vote for either of them anyway. You’d think she’d be all over a vast right-wing conspiracy.
Frankly Al Gore did a much better job of staying out of the limelight and letting the world dub him “Saint Gore”, savior of the alternate timeline where Bush never became President (regardless of whether Gore would have actually made a good president or not). Hillary’s got an even easier job becoming Saint Hillary, if only she can stop herself.