With the release of her new book, What Happened, Hillary has been speaking out and the uproar for her to shut up and go away from the main stream media and pundits has been infuriating. Like a lot of Hillary supporters, I just don’t understand this. There were no calls for Mitt Romney to go away, not John McCain, not Ted Cruz, or Marco Rubio, or Jeb Bush, or even professional candidate Mike Hucklebee. No calls for Bernie Sanders to stop rehashing the election. In a week where Steve Bannon, a white supremacist, gets a soft ball interview on a major network show like “60 minutes,” Hillary Clinton gets bashed for telling her side of the story in an election that happened just last year. You can’t make this stuff up.
It’s not even about the book since Sanders released a book about the 2016 election and the headlines were completely different than with Hillary. Same paper but Hillary is supposed to go away while Bernie’s book is group therapy.
Hillary isn’t the first person to lose an election. She’s not even the first person who ran twice and didn’t win. Like her or not, she has millions of fans, a number of them women of color like myself, and it’s insulting to tell her and us to sit in the corner and be quiet. Frankly, if the media had done their job in the 2016 election, instead of being the unpaid public relations firm for the Donald Trump campaign (Morning Joe, I’m talking to you), this country wouldn’t have an inexperienced, narcissist playing with our nuclear codes.
With the media waiting patiently, covering empty podiums until Trump arrived, they failed to cover the pages and pages of actual policies and real details Hillary had. While they talked about her emails for months and months, they didn’t give enough attention to Trump’s real scandals like the Access Hollywood tapes, and the bankruptcies, and the tax returns, and the Russian connections, and the violence at his rallies, and his discrimination cases, and the lawsuits, and the sexual abuse allegations. There were so many scandals that the media treated like afterthoughts while going on incessantly about Hillary’s emails. And even after the months of coverage, I have yet to hear anyone explain what was so wrong about the emails and the private server considering that the previous Secretaries of State also had private servers. Even Hillary’s fitness came into question for doing what most women do when sick, work through it. Donald Trump showed a letter from some random doctor proclaiming him to be the most fit person to ever run for office and the media treated it as if it was normal.
Maybe the political pundits want Hillary to go away because it reminds them of their role in helping to elect Donald Trump. For all the soul-searching and apologies that these people demand of Hillary, they don’t want to address their roles and how to prevent this from happening in the next election.
But it doesn’t matter what the pundits, Bernie, or Trump supporters say. There are millions of supporters still with Hillary. People started lining up at 4 p.m. on Monday to see Hillary Clinton at her first book signing on Tuesday. So Hillary can write whatever she wants, she can give as many interviews as she wants, she can be as angry as she wants, and not smile ever again if she wants. Like it or lump it, Hillary Clinton isn’t going away, and her supporters aren’t either.