The 2016 candidate tore into Sanders, saying he’s wildly unpopular in Congress and accusing him of using Trumpian tactics.
Hillary Clinton has taken herself off the sidelines of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination with a brutal condemnation of Sen. Bernie Sanders, his campaign team, and his supporters.
In an interview with
The Hollywood Reporter to promote the upcoming Hulu documentary,
Hillary,
Clinton laid into her 2016 Democratic primary rival who she has
previously accused of contributing to her eventual election defeat to
Donald Trump. Clinton said Sanders and his team have relentlessly
attacked Democratic women, and she threw her support behind Sen.
Elizabeth Warren, who has faced abuse for claiming Sanders told her
during a private meeting that a woman couldn’t win the election.
Clinton’s
stinging attack came the day after Sanders was forced to apologize to
former Vice President Joe Biden because his campaign had promoted an
overzealous op-ed by one of his surrogates accusing Biden of having a “big corruption problem.”
The Hollywood Reporter
was interviewing Clinton about the upcoming Hulu documentary and read
her a quote from one of the scenes: “[Sanders] was in Congress for
years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to
work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s
all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.”
Asked
if that assessment still stood, Clinton said yes and then went further.
She refused to say whether she would endorse him if her party chose him
as its 2020 candidate, but made it clear that she hoped that wouldn’t
happen.
Clinton and Sanders fell out
in a big way during the 2016 campaign but she was not expected to
intervene so powerfully in the current race. In her 2017 book,
What Happened,
Clinton argued that Sanders’ attacks against her during the primary
contributed to Trump’s shock victory. She wrote that Sanders resorted to
“innuendo and impugning my character” because he was unable to
criticize her effectively on policy, which she believes caused her “lasting damage” when it came to November 2016.
Clinton has now told the
Hollywood Reporter that the entire Sanders 2020 operation is a problem.
“It’s
not only him, it’s the culture around him,” she said. “It’s his
leadership team. It’s his prominent supporters. It’s his online Bernie
Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors,
particularly the women. And I really hope people are paying attention to
that because it should be worrisome that he has permitted this
culture—not only permitted, [he] seems to really be very much supporting
it.”
Clinton
went on to accuse Sanders of giving his supporters tacit approval to go
after female nominees such as Warren and Sen. Kamala Harris by giving
them “a wink.” She appeared to discourage people from voting for Sanders
on that basis, saying: “I think that that’s a pattern that people
should take into account when they make their decisions.”
Clinton became particularly heated when asked about Warren’s claim that Sanders told her a woman couldn’t win the presidency.
Sanders
denied that he had said it during last week’s televised debate and
Warren initially tried to diffuse the situation, saying, “Bernie is my
friend, and I’m not here to try to fight with Bernie.”
Warren’s
irritation boiled over at the end of the debate, however, and she
confronted Sanders on stage, thinking the cameras were no longer
rolling. CNN eventually released a recording that showed her facing him down over the denial. “I think you called me a liar on national TV,” she said.
Clinton obviously shared Warren’s frustration. She said it was
nonsense to say a woman couldn’t win since she won the primaries in 2016
and got around three million more votes than Trump later that year.
Then she turned on Sanders once again, claiming his campaign had “gone
after Elizabeth [Warren] with a very personal attack on her” after her
disclosure.
“If it were a one-off, you might say, ‘OK, fine,’”
said Clinton. “But he said I was unqualified. I had a lot more
experience than he did, and got a lot more done than he had, but that
was his attack on me. I just think people need to pay attention because
we want, hopefully, to elect a president who’s going to try to bring us
together, and not either turn a blind eye, or actually reward the kind
of insulting, attacking, demeaning, degrading behavior that we’ve seen
from this current administration.”
Elsewhere in the interview,
Clinton said she had talked to Warren, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and
“practically everybody” who either has run for the Democratic nomination
or is still running. When asked if Sanders was excluded from that, she
confirmed, by a nod of the head, that he wasn’t.
Asked what advice
she’s given, Clinton said she told the female candidates: “You can run
the best campaign, but you’re going to have to be even better than your
best campaign to overcome some of the unfairness that will be directed
at you as a woman.”
Sanders has declined to comment.
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