The Democratic Civil War Is Getting Nasty, Even if No One Is Paying Attention
In the weeks after Greenberg published his critique, I spoke with several other veterans of the Bill Clinton years who shared his appraisal of Hillary’s campaign—and said that their advice had also been ignored. “They viewed people like me and Bill Clinton as yesteryear,” one, who ran his campaign in a key Midwestern state and played a public role in Hillary Clinton’s campaign there as well, said. “They thought the world has changed, politics has changed. But their analytics were flawed. They were treating this like a third term for Obama, and it was a big mistake.” The internal critics, they told me, had also included the former President, but he was, as Greenberg put it when we talked, “frozen out.”
This was, I realized, one of the hidden stories of the 2016 election. A former top adviser to the Clinton campaign said that Greenberg’s gripes were a “misplaced diagnosis for why we lost” and noted that Bill Clinton had been a vigorous participant in the campaign’s strategic discussions. Hillary Clinton herself alluded to Greenberg’s critique, though not thecampaign’s internal debates over it, in her recent memoir, dismissing as “baloney” Greenberg’s argument that she “went silent on the economy and change” in the key final days before the election. But, even if the fight is in part an exercise in after-the-fact finger-pointing, the campaign’s internal struggles over how to talk to the Trump base in the formerly Democratic states of Middle America are just as relevant, polarizing, and unresolved today as they were a year ago. Should Democrats bet their future on attacking Trump and pledge, as the California billionaire donor Tom Steyer now wants them to do, to pursue Trump’s impeachment, at all costs, if they win back the House next year? Should they give up on the white voters who went for Trump in 2016 even though many had been reliably Democratic in the past? Was Clinton’s defeated primary challenger, Bernie Sanders, right to try to pull the Party to the left?
Burn Baby, Burn.