While Trump Jr's busy spilling the beans, Hillary Clinton makes her own confession

Donald Trump Jr has been coming clean about his past meeting with a Russian lawyer in the hope of getting dirt on his father’s former political opponent Hillary Clinton. But at the same time, it seems Clinton is providing her own confession; albeit indirectly.

A new book from OR Books – How I Lost By Hillary Clinton – cheekily uses Clinton’s own words against her. Based on leaks published by WikiLeaks from the email accounts of Clinton and her campaign team, award-winning journalist Joe Lauria provides very useful annotations. And WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange even provides the foreword.

In short, the book lays out exactly why Clinton failed to beat Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

The real story

There have been many articles and comments about why Clinton lost her election campaign. And it’s often been the stance of the Democratic Party itself to blame Russian interference, the electoral college system, and former FBI director James Comey’s investigations.

But an inward look at the leaked Clinton emails shows that she lost, essentially, because she was an unpopular candidate who ran an unpopular campaign.

Greed, hegemony, out-of-touch, and elitist

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell once described Hillary in rather unkind words as:

a 70-year person with a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational, with a husband still dicking bimbos at home

We can see elements of such greed in the book. Like receiving sums of up to six figures in return for delivering speeches, in particular to the banking sector, in her capacity as former Secretary of State. Or revelations that her husband, former president Bill Clinton, was benefiting personally from their charitable foundation.

And despite not growing up rich, she admitted in one speech that she could never understand the point of view that “the system was rigged”. As the book argues, this made her seem like an out-of-touch elitist.

But it was her shrewd foreign policy stance that really damned her in many people’s eyes. And this makes up a large part of the book. Under her watch as Secretary of State, the book argues, the US administration:

pursued a furtherance of its rulers’ wealth and power at the expense of millions of people at home and abroad. Hillary Clinton today is at the center of this deception of pretending to deliver democracy and social progress to the majority, while doing the opposite.

Backing a loser

Clinton’s candidacy may have had ‘loser’ written all over it. But it seems the party establishment had the blinkers on. It was thus absolutely determined to crush her opponent: the man who just might have been able to beat Trump. He quickly became a difficult obstacle to get rid of. And the material in the book shows the “venom that Sanders engendered in the Clinton campaign”.

Here was a self-declared socialist creating a deeply unfavorable contrast with the center-right Clinton, unmasking her as someone only pretending to be progressive.

And arguably, many voters saw her slight shift leftwards to compete with Sanders and get his supporters on board for what it was. Disingenuous.

UK readers may be able to see a mirror to the political climate at home; in the way that Jeremy Corbyn’s rise rattled many within the Labour Party and provoked a shift in rhetoric from other leadership candidates. (The big difference being, of course, that Corbyn managed to win.)

The leaks and considered annotation in How I Lost By Hillary Clinton are enlightening; exposing the murky underbelly of politics, the betrayal of the media, the imperialist mindset, and the ugly motives behind establishment power games. It’s also a useful reminder to read between the lines when our political candidates and their mouthpieces address us.