Anyone expecting introspection from Hillary Clinton's new book is going to come away disappointed. Rather than admitting her campaign was a disastrous mish-mash of incompetence and already-rejected ideas, Hillary has decided to (as usual) blame everyone else for her failures. She blames the New York Times, she blames James Comey, and she blames Barack Obama. She blames her own party, parts of her staff, and of course, Republicans. She even portrays herself as the hero of a high stakes spy-thriller who's doing battle against a nebulous conspiracy that she can't quite "get her arms around."
She also blames Bernie Sanders - the man she and the DNC conspired to destroy.
Bernie, it seems, was stealing her ideas. To make her point, she uses a springtime-fresh reference to the 20-year-old movie "There's Something About Mary."
"A deranged hitchhiker says he's come up with a brilliant plan. Instead of the famous 'eight-minute abs' exercise routine, he's going to market 'seven-minute abs.' It's the same, just quicker. Then the driver, played by Ben Stiller, says, 'Well, why not six-minute abs?' That's what it was like in policy debates with Bernie. We would propose a bold infrastructure investment plan or an ambitious new apprenticeship program for young people, and then Bernie would announce basically the same thing, but bigger. On issue after issue, it was like he kept proposing four-minute abs, or even no-minute abs. Magic abs!"
There's that famous Hillary wit in action! Nice to see her keeping it "hip" and "fresh" for the kids.
Here's the interesting thing about this: She's coming close to the truth, but she still won't admit the reality of "what happened." It's not that Bernie was stealing her ideas. It's that her and Bernie share almost identical socialist ideals - but he was willing to acknowledge and vocalize them.
Issue by issue - with the possible exception of foreign entanglement - their positions are almost indistinguishable from one another. Both want more taxes, more handouts, more government, more social engineering, and more socialism. That viewpoint drives their choices on every single issue.
Bernie didn't "steal" anything. Hillary just refused to say that she agreed with pretty much everything Bernie said. ...And Bernie knows it:
The prevailing left-wing "wisdom" is that "Bernie woulda won." I disagree. Bernie's plans undoubtedly energized statists, but I've previously argued that Bernie had the luxury of leaving the race before he had to explain how he'd pay for his vision. I believe that, if he'd been forced to answer those questions, his responses would have doomed him in the general election.
Despite her detachment from middle-America, Hillary knows that. So, she ran the usual Democrat stealth campaign. She talked about restrained, streamlined, and downsized government in an effort to "tell them what they want to hear." Once in office, we all know she would have run hog wild.
Bernie didn't destroy Hillary, Hillary destroyed Hillary. However, in the above clip with Chris Hayes, Bernie does outline the way he has damaged the Democratic Party. By dragging the Dems' base even further left, offering them a glimpse of a real socialist. That paints the party into a corner where, if they nominate a centrist, they outrage the base. If they cater to the base, they lose the moderates.
The bottom line? While Bernie may have done near-irreparable harm to the party he briefly chose to call home, "stealing Hillary's ideas" had nothing to do with. She failed all by herself.
