Former President Bill Clinton criticized his wife’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, stating that it “could not sell p***y on a troop train.”
He attributed the failure to the heavy reliance on identity politics, which he believed alienated moderate voters and pushed them towards her primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville also expressed concern about the campaign’s use of language that did not resonate with average American voters. (Trending: Joe Biden Impeachment Formalized As Republicans Unite)
“To the extent that the campaign tactic moved the needle at all, it likely pushed moderate voters paying only marginal attention to the campaign towards Sanders, who spoke like a normal person while Clinton began ascending into what her ally James Carville would later call, ‘faculty lounge speak,’” Grim wrote.
“They come up with a word like ‘Latinx’ that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like ‘communities of color.’ I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I don’t know anyone who lives in a ‘community of color.’ I know lots of white and black and brown people and they all live in … neighborhoods,” Carville said in 2021.
“This is not how people talk. This is not how voters talk. And doing it anyway is a signal that you’re talking one language and the people you want to vote for you are speaking another language.”
Clinton’s blunt assessment and Carville’s criticism highlight the campaign’s disconnect with voters and its reliance on divisive tactics.
“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—y on a troop train,’” Grim’s book added.
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