Twice-failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has ignited a firestorm from the left after telling voters who are complaining of a rematch between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden to “get over yourself.”
Clinton’s comment came during an appearance on The Tonight Show with host Jimmy Fallon on Monday.
“Get over yourself, those are the two choices … And, you know, it’s kind of like one is old and effective and compassionate, has a heart & really cares about people, and one is old and has been charged with 91 felonies,” said the former first lady.
“I don’t understand why this is even a hard choice,” she added.
But Clinton’s sharp remark is drawing criticism from the left.
Democrat Strategist Mark Longabaugh told the Hill that the moment underscored Clinton’s tendency for being “tonally off-sync.” Notably, in September 2016, two months before that year’s election, then-Demcorat presidential nominee Clinton said, “To just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.” She went on to lose the election.
Longabough continued per the Hill:
“I’m not sure that is the most effective way to win disaffected Democrats, younger voters, back to Joe Biden. I’m really not,” Longabaugh said.
“Young people want to be inspired, they don’t want to be lectured to,” he added. “The way to win them back is not to wag your finger at them but to talk about Biden’s great achievements on climate, about his work to protect a woman’s right to choose, and so on.”
On Tuesday, Zeeshan Aleem, a columnist for far-left MSNBC, emphasized that Clinton “has a responsibility to address voters’ doubts in a way that meets them where they are,” as Biden surrogates are supposed to do.
“She not only failed to do that — she seemed uninterested in it,” he added, before opining the comment lacked “empathy” and was “borderline scornful.”
He wrote:
The core problem with Clinton’s communication style in her remarks is an absence of empathy. Polling indicates that Biden is cursed by the same problem as she was in 2016 — high unfavorability that puts him on roughly equal footing with Trump. Clinton not only fails to grapple with the reasons that some segments of the population might find both candidates prohibitively distasteful, but also appears to not want to understand it. “Get over yourself” and “I don’t understand it” are not messages of persuasion. Nor do they qualify as firing up the base. They’re borderline scornful.
The former first lady’s rhetoric comes as Democrats and Biden are having issues with young voters for multiple reasons. A Gallup poll published Monday showed that Biden’s economy is the top issue for 47 percent of voters 18-29. In 2020, only 11 percent of this cohort rated the economy as the top issue.
What is more, divisions on the left regarding Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war are rampant and are imperiling the president’s reelection bid. This divide is stark among young Americans, more of whom have stronger sympathy for Gazans than Israelis, according to a Pew Research Center poll published Tuesday.
Democrats under 30 are largely driving this trend, with 47 percent saying they are sympathetic to Palestinians while only 7 percent sympathize with Israelis. Another 23 percent have equal empathy for both Israelis and Palestinians. Among young Republicans, 28 percent sympathize more with Israel, 12 percent sympathize more with Palestinians, and 24 percent empathize equally with both.
The trend was inverted among all respondets over 65 – with 47 percent of the demographic sympathizing with Israel and 9 percent sympathizing with Palestinians – and highlights generational change concerning outlooks on Israel. Democrat President Harry Truman “was the first world leader to officially recognize Israel as a legitimate Jewish state on May 14, 1948, only eleven minutes after its creation,” the Truman Library notes.
The poll sampled 12,693 American adults from February 13 through 15.
Pro-Palestinian protesters confronted Clinton in New York City on Wednesday night, the Post Millenial reported Friday.
In a video the outlet reshared from X user @taliaotg, one man can be heard saying, “Hillary Clinton, hi! Has anyone told you, ‘You are the super predator?’”
A woman is heard saying, “Hillary Clinton, you are responsible for genocides; you are responsible for atrocities! You are literally helping fucking facilitate the genocide of Palestinian people. What the fuck do you have to say for yourself?”
In the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attack, Biden declared, “We stand with Israel.” Since then, pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protests have unfolded at the White House, the Democrat National Committee headquarters, and Biden’s glitzy elitist fundraiser in New York City last week, as well as on his planned motorcade route to the State of the Union in March.
Now, the president finds himself in a high-wire balancing act, trying to hold together a coalition of pro-Israel Democrats and pro-Palestinian Democrats who are watching his every policy move. And Clinton’s comment does not do him favors in this regard, according to Aleem.
“Expressing bewilderment at people who believe that Biden is complicit in genocide will only further repel those who believe that a protest vote or deliberate abstention is in order,” he wrote.
And after Clinton failed to quell voter concerns, Biden on Thursday demanded an “immediate ceasefire” in the Hamas-Israel war while speaking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu via a phone call, a move that could wound his standing with pro-Israel Democrats.