I'll quote something. Because it's a major topic of argument on this website: the part where she discusses, "with six months of perspective", the votes she shouldn't have lost. Especially the part about votes lost to searches about the Wikileaks files, my underlining (hint: she doesn't think some of the swings she lost are stupid racist nazis):

Besides, she argues, “what I was doing was working. I would have won had I not been subjected to the unprecedented attacks by Comey and the Russians, aided and abetted by the suppression of the vote, particularly in Wisconsin.” She agrees that there are lessons to be learned from her campaign, just not the same ones her critics would cite. “Whoever comes next, this is not going to end. Republicans learned that if you suppress votes you win … So take me out of the equation as a candidate. You know, I’m not running for anything. Put me into the equation as somebody who has lived the lessons that people who care about this country should probably pay attention to.”

Piecing together what happened, with six months of perspective, Clinton says she thinks she “underestimated WikiLeaks and the impact that had, because I thought it was so silly.” Those hacked emails, dripped out over weeks, says Clinton, “were innocuous, boring, inconsequential. And each one was played like it was some breathless flash. And so you got Trump, in the last month of the campaign, talking about WikiLeaks something like 164 times; you’ve got all his minions out there, you’ve got the right-wing media just blowing it up. You’ve got Google searches off the charts.”

Clinton has been looking at where some of the Google searches for WikiLeaks were coming from. “They were from a lot of places where people were trying to make up their minds,” she says. “Like, ‘Oh my God, I kinda like her, I don’t like him, but she might go to jail. And then what about all this other stuff?’ It was just such a dump of cognitive dissonance …” Clinton trails off and then smiles and nods to herself. “I have a lot of sympathy for voters in a lot of places I didn’t win,” she says. “Because I can see how hard it was.”

The press, she believes, didn’t make it any easier. “Look, we have an advocacy press on the right that has done a really good job for the last 25 years,” she says. “They have a mission. They use the rights given to them under the First Amendment to advocate a set of policies that are in their interests, their commercial, corporate, religious interests. Because the advocacy media occupies the right, and the center needs to be focused on providing as accurate information as possible. Not both-sides-ism and not false equivalency.”

“Why … would … you … do … that?” she says. “Sixty-six million people voted for me, plus, you know, the crazy third-party people. So there’s a lot of people who would actually appreciate stronger arguments on behalf of the most existential challenges facing our country and the world, climate change being one of them! It’s clearly a commercial decision. But I don’t think it will work. I mean, they’re laughing on the right at these puny efforts to try to appease people on the right.”

 “Oh, yeah,” she says, nodding. “ ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t vote. I didn’t think you needed me.’ I don’t know how we’ll ever calculate how many people thought it was in the bag, because the percentages kept being thrown at people — ‘Oh, she has an 88 percent chance to win!’ I never bought any of that, but lots of people did.”

Yeah, those fights between the polling novice at Huffpost and Nate Silver... "why's Nate so gloomy"

Thanks for a good read, Barefooted!

I liked the part about there being so much coverage about Trump or Sanders voters but very little about enthusiastic Clinton voters. That said, it is a bit unfair - there is a man-bites-dog element to outlier figures like Trump and Sanders rising up out of nowhere and leading huge movements. The question, "why are people voting for these eccentrics?" is a much more interesting question than the question why main-stream democrats are voting for a main-stream democrat.

Nonetheless, personally I would have liked to understand the core entusiastic Clinton voters better.  And I don't mean just old boomer economic centrists and single-issue feminists. I also don't mean people enthusiastically against Trump. I mean the people in these anecdotes, who have been going up to Clinton in the woods or in restaurants to hug her, like old friends reunited or commiserating. I find it bizarre. I imagine it is people who identify with her story in some way.

What I'm trying to get at is that it would have been good in that piece to get Hillary's perspective on her strengths as a candidate, not just on her weaknesses or her enemies and systemic disadvantages. Who were the people who were most drawn to her and why. The charge she - or the journalist - throws at media bias applies just as much to herself (and to the journalist who fails to dig deeper). The press doesn't talk about it partly because Clinton doesn't care to talk about it. Her story, even in her own terms, is about the obstacles on the way, the enemies trying to bring her down. All we really learn is her indomitable will and ability to overcome. But that still rings hollow to me. Her rapid dismissal of therapy or anything vaguely associated with introspection struck me as well. I could go on, but all that may just be my own bias I guess. Maybe her core appeal is too obvious to mention. And then, if it is too obvious, it's understandable for the press to pass over it in silence. 

I must say I liked her commencement address at Wellesley:

(...) let me add that your learning, listening, and serving should include people who don’t agree with you politically. A lot of our fellow Americans have lost faith in the existing economic, social, political, and cultural conditions of our country.

Many feel left behind, left out, looked down on. Their anger and alienation has proved a fertile ground for false promises and false information. Their economic problems and cultural anxiety must be addressed, or they will continue to sign up to be foot-soldiers in the ongoing conflict between “us” and “them.”

The opportunity is here. Millions of people will be hurt by the policies, including this budget that is being considered. And many of these same people don’t want DREAMers deported or health care taken away. Many don’t want to retreat on civil rights, women’s rights, and LGBT rights. So if your outreach is rebuffed, keep trying. Do the right thing anyway. We’re going to share this future. Better to do so with open hearts and outstretched hands than closed minds and clenched fists. 

It would have been nice if Democrats lead with this philosophy during the next campaign and avoid the basket of deplorables line. 

More Hillary today @ NYMag, including "slagging the DNC", as the lede puts in, from Weds. interview at Recode’s CodeCon by its co-founder

Hillary Clinton on Why She Gave Those Goldman Sachs Speeches: ‘They Paid Me’

By Adam K. Raymond, May 31

[....] The DNC. The Democratic National Committee gave Clinton nothing after she won the nomination, she said, adding the party’s deficient data operation to the list of reasons why she lost last year’s election. “I inherited nothing from the Democratic Party,” Clinton said. “I mean, it was bankrupt. It was on the verge of insolvency. Its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong. I had to inject money into it.” [....]

Besides Goldman Sachs and the DNC, also quotes on Russian hacking, private email server, right wing media control & her political future.