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The Way We Never Were
Hillary Clinton’s doomed 2016 victory speech is what went wrong and why.
“In this lesson, I’m going to face one of my most public defeats head-on by sharing with you the speech I had hoped to deliver if I had won the 2016 election,” Hillary Clinton says into the camera. It is a line delivered for the subscription video streaming service “MasterClass”, soon to be featured in a series about resilience.
Revealed for the first time, it was to be a speech filled with platitudes about past and future, emotional appeals to the better angels of our national nature, heartfelt thanks on behalf of all the little boys and little girls who might want to be president someday, and many allusions to the glass ceiling.
What we’ve learned in the hard years since 2016 has jaundiced many an otherwise sympathetic ear, even among Democrats and Independents.
We now know the candidate aspiring to shatter all those glass ceilings for the sake of the dear little children was protecting Democratic Party mega-donor Harvey Weinstein and his infamous casting couch.
It has become clear in hindsight that Clinton wasn’t the strongest candidate Democrats might have run in 2016.
Quite probably, Democratic Party leadership should have coalesced around Joe Biden starting long before 2014, the way they did for…