No Offense, but Hillary Clinton’s Advice Is Really Not Needed Here (2024)

Every year since 1993, the Toronto Blue Jays have failed to win the World Series. They’ve gotten close—an AL East Division title in 2015, and four wild-card berths. As a frequent Jays bandwagoner, I often think about José Bautista’s 2015 bat flip, which to this day gives me the most pleasing stomachache. Still, I wouldn’t talk to the Blue Jays if I were trying to get a better sense of how to win an important baseball game. That’s just not what they’re known for! Winning is simply not within their area of expertise.

This is also how I feel every time I see Hillary Clinton weigh in on the upcoming presidential election. She lost a similar race of her own almost eight years ago but is still, somewhat inexplicably, considered a politician with unique insight into our political moment. Earlier this week, the New York Times published an op-ed by Clinton, detailing her own experiences debating both Donald Trump and Joe Biden and offering guidance to viewers on how to watch this week’s debate. “I am the only person to have debated both men,” she wrote. “I know the excruciating pressure of walking onto that stage and that it is nearly impossible to focus on substance when Mr. Trump is involved.” This is, technically, a factual statement—no one else has had to debate both the current president and the former president as she has. I have no doubt it will be challenging to suss out whatever minimal substance is available on Thursday night. But more urgently: Why am I reading this?

Since she lost the election in 2016, Clinton has made it a chief tenet of her public personality that she was right about Trump all along. In 2019 she said that losing the election was like “applying for a job and getting 66 million letters of recommendation and losing to a corrupt human tornado.” After his second indictment in 2023, she posted a photo of herself in a “But Her Emails” hat, a “limited-edition” item that you can still buy for $32 if for some reason you want to give a multimillionaire more money. After Trump was found guilty of hush money payments, she posted a photo of a mug for sale, with her outline and the words “Turns out she was right about everything.” Clinton was right about a few things, but the things she was wrong about were pretty damn significant too. José Bautista popped that baseball clean over the wall and gave long-suffering Jays fans an incredible home run; the Blue Jays still don’t know how to win a World Series.

For almost a decade now, Clinton has been determined to rewrite herself back into the political narrative as a woman who was uniquely right for the job—but who got screwed over by an unprecedented candidate and a sexist public. She’s not wrong there: Trump is unlike any other political candidate in American history, and her womanhood proved tricky for even Clinton to manage. Her “efforts to satisfy a ravening press and public intolerant of female complexity left her so twisted and poll-tested that she became largely illegible as human, let alone female,” Rebecca Traister wrote of Clinton in New York magazine earlier this month.

But it’s not as if Clinton has evolved—or attempted some novel approach to reaching the public—after her mortifying, loud, public loss to Trump. In fact, she and plenty of other old-guard members of the Democratic Party seem positively horny about trying to keep things running the same way they did in the 1990s. In her Times piece, Clinton asks for a return to form, a time when political theater was performed with dignity (calling Black teenagers “super-predators,” I guess), as opposed to Trump’s version of theater (mocking journalists, being a felon, threatening to take his shirt off, defaming E. Jean Carroll over and over again). “As viewers, we should try not to get hung up on the theatrics,” Clinton writes, but what are the debates if not theatrics? Clinton is presently stuck in the theatrics of bragging about how right she was that Trump would fundamentally reshape the United States. Fine! You were right! You lost the election and you were right. Now what, girly pop??

If you read her story without having lived through 2016, or without having seen the famous 2016 Trump–Clinton debate itself—the one where Trump followed Clinton around the stage like a vulture waiting for her to die so he could eat her meaty little eyeballs—it almost sounds as if she won. Maybe she did win the debate. But the election? The election she lost? The election she lost because she assumed that no reasonable person could vote for a morally repugnant nonpolitician promising to upend the status quo—so much so that she didn’t campaign in Wisconsin and became the first Democratic presidential nominee to lose the state since 1984? Well, that’s a lot harder to fit on a $22 coffee mug ($7.66 for shipping? How about you Pokemon Go f*ck off!).

Clinton hasn’t been clued in to what progressives have been shouting about, loudly, for some time: The same old sh*t is not winning hearts and minds. It barely did before, when the Democratic Party was operating mostly as a nervous, conflict-averse centrist counterweight to the (unbearably effective and terrifyingly maniacal) bombast of the Republicans. And now that large swaths of potential Democratic voters are completely alienated by the president’s stance on Israel’s war in Gaza, Clinton is back to her same old tricks—blaming the people for just not getting it. Of pro-Palestinian protesters, for example, Clinton said that they “don’t know very much” about history. “That’s our fault,” she added. “The information they get, more often than not, is off of social media.” Of course! Social media is only for hawking expensive merchandise and for running your mouth about how you were right about Donald Trump.

Clinton is still living in a world where Teen Vogue might write an article applauding her—or, more accurately, her 25-year-old social media manager—for “clapping back” at Trump. You thought my lede to this story was meandering? Well, Clinton spends an entire paragraph of her New York Times op-ed talking about a Broadway musical she co-produced and also about Hamilton. No one else is quite as stuck in 2016, determined to try to reset the world into a kind of order she understands.

What Clinton wants, in all these attempts to give advice and guidance on how to make sense of a competition similar to the one she historically lost, is to return to a world order that flatters her ego and that of so many other high-ranking Democrats. Life was sweeter when she had a better chance of winning merely by virtue of being viewed as the least worst choice. “This election is between a convicted criminal out for revenge and a president who delivers results for the American people,” she writes, but that’s just not true when it comes to the optics of this race. It’s an election between a convicted criminal and a president who has not been able to protect abortion rights, has not pushed to reform the Supreme Court, has sent $1 billion in arms and ammunitions to Israel without any conditions, and has pursued a handful of policy moves—on immigration and oil production in particular—that were essentially promised by Trump as well.

Everyone from staunch old-world Democrats to socialist progressives knows that Trump is a bad choice for president; we knew it back in 2016 too, even if we didn’t yet appreciate how possible (or inevitable) his election indeed was. When Clinton reminds us that she was right, she would like us to forget the most salient part: She didn’t make it across the finish line. She wants the kind of victory that comes only with the benefit of hindsight, mostly her own. If I lost so publicly, so colossally, to such an internationally detrimental effect, I wouldn’t lecture people about the stakes of the upcoming election so freely. But what’s that old expression? Those who can’t do teach? It sure seems, right now, that Clinton can’t teach us that much at all.

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