Hillary's Turn: In A TV Book Tour, Clinton Has Scores To Settle

• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, September 13, 2017

Uh-oh, here she comes!

It's Hillary Clinton, reemerging this month on the talk-show circuit in support of a new book one year after the final weeks of the presidential campaign that ended in her defeat by Donald Trump.

Ouch, that's gotta hurt!

And yes, it still does hurt, according to Hillary, who nevertheless is looking back on the campaign with a certain amount of defiance mixed with a modicum of humility (but not too much).

Hillary's Rehabilitation Tour 2017 kicked off Sunday morning on “CBS Sunday Morning” with Jane Pauley. That's the two of them in the photo above in Hillary's Chappaqua living room. Looks comfy, right?

Next up is “The View” today (Wednesday, September 13), where she will get plenty of sympathy from the likes of Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg and the other four panelists who nobody ever heard of.

Next week, you can see her on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on CBS (Tuesday, September 19) -- not “Fallon” on NBC, of course, since he's turned the once-invincible “Tonight Show” into a pathetic also-ran in the ratings. Thanks, Jimmy. Way to go.

She is also booked for “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah” on November 1. What she will do between next week's “Colbert” appearance and “The Daily Show” in November is anybody's guess.

But if I were a guessing man, I would guess she will turn up elsewhere to promote her new book titled “What Happened,” about the campaign she lost. The book is out this week from Simon & Schuster, a CBS company -- which might explain why her first interview was on CBS.

Interestingly, the two-word title of the book does not include a question mark, which would have altered the tone of the title from the matter-of-fact “What happened” to the more shocked “What the hell happened?!”

Her interview on “CBS Sunday Morning” might provide a template for how she is now positioning her devastating loss to Donald Trump.

In her conversation with Pauley, Clinton accepted some responsibility, such as the time she used the word “deplorables” in a speech to refer to roughly half of Trump’s supporters. When Pauley characterized that as a gift to the Trump campaign, Clinton agreed.

But she also spread the blame for the loss around to other quarters -- among them Russian hackers, then-FBI director James Comey and Bernie Sanders, whose candidacy diluted her Democratic base.

In the interview on CBS, she also blamed “sexism and misogyny” and white-American anger for her losing campaign. And she made vague intimations of a right-wing conspiracy, which is right out of her long-time playbook.

Basically, she told Pauley, she took the view that people wouldn't accept a female president -- a view that is debatable. “I started the campaign knowing that I would have to work extra hard to make women and men feel comfortable with the idea of a woman president,” Clinton said. “It doesn't fit into the stereotypes we all carry around in our head. …

“And a lot of the sexism and the misogyny was in service of these attitudes like, you know, we really don't want a woman commander in chief,” she said.

At one point, Pauley asked her what it was like to attend Trump's inauguration. Hillary said she agreed to attend because she was a former first lady and would accompany her husband, an ex-president.

She described the feeling of being there as an out-of-body experience. She also described Trump's speech as “a cry from the white nationalist gut.”

Clinton told Pauley in no uncertain terms that she will never run for any office again, although she intends to say “in politics.” That probably means she will be outspoken about issues that people want to hear her talk about -- for a fee, of course.