Tone Deaf

Claire McCaskill has a message for Hillary Clinton: Shut the fuck up!

In a recent interview, the Missouri Democrat, who’s in for the race of her life, was none too pleased with Clinton’s comments regarding Trump voters. “For those of us that are in states Trump won, we would really appreciate if she would be more careful and show respect to every American voter and not just the ones who voted for her.”

Including herself, the “we” McCaskill is referring to are all the Democratic senators running in Trump states, such as Joe Manchin in West Virginia, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Joe Donnelly in Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, Jon Tester in Montana and Ben Nelson in Florida. As of right now, all seven could potentially lose this November. So you can appreciate her concern.

For the record, this is what Clinton said during a visit to India earlier this month: "I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward, and his whole campaign ‘Make America Great Again’ was looking backwards. ‘You know, you didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women, you know, getting jobs, you don’t want to, you know, see that Indian-Americans are succeeding more than you are–whatever your problem is, I’m going to solve it.'"

Once more, Clinton stuck her foot in her mouth and proved just how tone deaf she is. Her words reveal a staggering misunderstanding of what happened in the 2016 election and underscore the difficulty the Democratic Party still has in trying to figure out how to defeat Trump.

It isn't enough to blame Trump's victory on the pure demographics. There's more to it than that. Absent from Clinton's rhetoric is any trace of empathy for the people who, out of frustration and desperation, turned to Trump as their last hope. As much as I've beaten up on Bernie Sanders for some of his antics, including his non-support for Democratic candidates who he doesn't think are liberal - i.e., pure - enough for his tastes, he would never have been so stupid to utter what Clinton so arrogantly did. Whatever else you may think of him, he was the only Democratic candidate in 2016 who knew what was really going on in the Rust-Belt states and, true to form, the party all but ignored his warnings.

In short, Trump didn't win so much as Clinton lost. McCaskill gets that and so do the rest of what's left of the Blue Dog Democrats, without whom there is zero chance of Democrats ever taking back the Senate. Winning in Trump country will be difficult enough for them without the Marv Throneberry of American politics inserting her two cents worth of "wisdom" into the mix.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: Hillary Clinton needs to go away. She's become a lightning rod for the GOP. She's as toxic for Dems as Nancy Pelosi is. More so, because while not every one knows who Pelosi is, everyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the last forty years knows full well who Clinton is.

If she wants to make one more contribution to her party and her country, if she truly wants to see the current occupant of the Oval office evicted in 2020, she can best accomplish that by keeping as low a profile as possible. And in the event she can't or won't comply, it will be up to her party to put her in her place.

Look, there will forever be an asterisk next to the name Clinton. That's what happens when you lose to someone like Trump. Democrats owe it to themselves to make sure she doesn't get the chance to add a second one to it.