Barack Obama has been taking sneaky little potshots at the doomed Democratic presidential campaign since Trump beat Clinton, but now he’s made his most definitive statement: he reckons he would have won.
In an interview with longtime friend, political analyst David Axelrod, Obama gently repudiated the Clinton campaign’s complacency and referred to his own coalition building in 2008 and 2012 as evidence that he would have pulled through in a hypothetical third campaign:
I am confident in this vision because I’m confident that if I – if I had run again and articulated it – I think I could’ve mobilised a majority of the American people to rally behind it.
Much of the post-election critique has been focused on the fact that Clinton dramatically lost white working class voters that traditionally go Democratic. Obama rejected the idea that Democrats have abandoned the white working class.
See, I think the issue was less that Democrats have somehow abandoned the white working class, I think that’s nonsense. Look, the Affordable Care Act benefits a huge number of Trump voters. There are a lot of folks in places like West Virginia or Kentucky who didn’t vote for Hillary, didn’t vote for me, but are being helped by this . . . The problem is, is that we’re not there on the ground communicating not only the dry policy aspects of this, but that we care about these communities, that we’re bleeding for these communities.
Crucially, that last sentence is implying that Obama thinks it was a major failure of communication from the Clinton team. And that’s hard to argue with – Clinton barely visited Michigan, a bastion of anti-free trade, rust belt workers who flipped the state to Trump.
Axelrod said that it’s clear this is the furthest Obama has gone in criticising Clinton and her campaign, but that it was ultimately constructive. “This was all in service of making the point that he believes that his progressive vision and the vision he ran on is still a majority view in this country,” Axelrod said. “He chooses to be hopeful about the future.”
Source: Axe Files.
Photo: Getty Images.
