The former communications director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign did not mince words about her former boss in an interview with NPR on Tuesday.
Former Clinton 2016 communications director Jennifer Palmieri told NPR while promoting her book Dear Madam President that her former boss ran for president “with half her humanity behind her back.”
“She [Clinton] knew, she anticipated a lot of how the public would likely to react to her,” Palmieri said, noting that Hillary held back parts of personality to please the public. “I felt like Hillary was running for president with half her humanity tied behind her back.”
Palmieri further explained that the campaign failed in trying to make Clinton look like a leader who had qualities typically seen in male candidates and that the campaign’s strategy backfired on the American people in 2016 because many people saw Clinton as inauthentic.
“And I think that people’s distrust of her isn’t that everybody is sexist or misogynist; she vexes people and they don’t know what to make of her… because I think they don’t know what a woman in charge looks like,” she said.
Even before Clinton lost the election, voters and pundits soured on Clinton because they felt she was either “inauthentic” or “untrustworthy” as a candidate.
A poll conducted in July 2016 found that one in five Millennial voters who voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in the primary would not vote for Clinton in the general election.
Even Bill Mahr, the left-wing host of HBO’s Real Time, warned in February 2016 that Clinton’s campaign was in trouble due to the success of “non-establishment candidates” like Donald Trump and Sanders in the New Hampshire primary.