Hillary Clinton: When I Said Backward, I Meant Small Towns

The fallout from Hillary Clinton’s sore loser tour to India has been severe. Her suggestion that white women only voted for Trump because of their husbands and that it was the backward states that didn’t vote for her infuriated even her remaining Dem establishment supporters.

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), who’s currently facing a tough reelection bid in a state won by President Trump in the 2016 election, said this week that former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s exit from politics is way past due.

In an interview Tuesday, KFGO radio host Joel Heitkamp, the senator’s brother, asked when Clinton would “ride off into the sunset,” as he remarked on a recent speech Clinton gave in which she said the U.S. “did not deserve” President Trump’s victory in the 2016 election.

“I don’t know, not soon enough, I guess,” she responded.

Pressed again by the host, Heidi Heitkamp said: “Not soon enough.”

Hillary’s routine was the last thing that the Dems, who were celebrating Connor Lamb’s possible victory needed. So she decided to explain. Not apologize. Hillary doesn’t do apologies. Instead she laboriously sets out to explain why you ignorant troglodytes misunderstood what she was saying to you. The explanation ignores the reality of what she actually said.

My first instinct was to defend Americans and explain how Donald Trump could have been elected. I said that places doing better economically typically lean Democratic, and places where there is less optimism about the future lean Republican. That doesn’t mean the coasts versus the heartland, it doesn’t even mean entire states. In fact, it more often captures the divisions between more dynamic urban areas and less prosperous small towns within states.

Good to know. So when Hillary said backward, she meant small towns. Madison is still okay.

But Hillary was actually suggesting that these places are racist.

If you remember, Trump started his campaign attacking immigrants, because he knew that in many parts of the country — and let me just hasten to add, in many parts of the country where there aren’t very many immigrants — he was able to scapegoat immigrants.

Like, if you have problems, you’re not happy with your job, you don’t think you’ve gotten enough advancement, you’re working for a woman now, you don’t like it — whatever the reason was — he stirred that up, and anti-immigrant feeling became so virulent, thanks to his rhetoric, that it was a big motivator in a lot of the votes in certain parts of the country.

If you look at the map of the United States, there’s all that red in the middle where Trump won. I win the coasts, I win Illinois and Minnesota, places like that. But what the map doesn’t show you, is that 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 getting jobs, you don’t want to see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are. “Whatever your problem is, I’m going to solve it.”

The division Hillary was setting out is quite obvious. Small towns are full of ignorant, poor, racist people who voted Trump. Cities are full of rich, successful Hillary voters.

You can see why the Dems desperately want her to go.

I’m from the Midwest. I had plans that, had I been elected, would have focused on the real needs of hard-working yet struggling Americans in every part of the country.

Noblesse oblige doesn’t come any more oblige.

“I understand how some of what I said upset people and can be misinterpreted. I meant no disrespect to any individual or group. And I want to look to the future as much as anybody,” Hillary writes.

Sure. As much as any bitter, unhinged failed politico obsessed with relitigating the 2016 election.