John McCain says Hillary Clinton should just get over it.
Comparing his post-2008 doldrums with Clinton’s current struggle to understand how she lost to Donald Trump, the Arizona senator tells Esquire that unlike Clinton, he resisted the instinct to play Monday morning quarterback after Barack Obama beat him.
The failed Democratic presidential nominee quickly began promoting a memoir called ‘What Happened’ after the 2016 election, blaming dozens of people and factors for her defeat, but never herself.
‘You’ve got to understand that you can’t rewrite history,’ McCain said in an interview published Monday.
‘The hardest thing to do is to just shut up’: Sen. John McCain tells Hillary Clinton in an ‘Esquire’ interview that she should stop re-litigating the 2016 election
Clinton lost the White House to Donald trump in stunning fashion and then launched a book tour to blame a long list of offenders – but never herself – for the result
‘Game Change’ dissected McCain’s loss to Barack Obama, blaming in part his decision to make Sarah Palin his running mate
‘One of the almost irresistible impulses you have when you lose is to somehow justify why you lost and how you were mistreated: “I did the right thing! I did!” The hardest thing to do is to just shut up.’
McCain had the Senate to fall back on when his presidential aspirations went belly-up.
Hillary had only a series of sympathetic TV interviews and her book tour.
McCain suggested she got back on the horse too quickly.
‘What’s the f***ing point?’ the salty former naval aviator asked: ‘Keep the fight up?’
‘History will judge that campaign, and it’s always a period of time before they do. You’ve got to move on.’
‘This is Hillary’s problem right now: She doesn’t have anything to do,’ McCain said.
Clinton rushed to explain her version of history after she lost the 2016 election, with a memoir called ‘What Happened’ – something McCain says she did far too soon
Much of McCain’s post-election heartburn came in the form of reporting about how unprepared former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was to run for the vice presidency
The senator, now in declining health as he fights brain cancer, faced an unusual obstacle to his political rehabilitation as Obama began his presidency: a tell-all book of the kind that younger politicians seldom recover from.
‘Game Change,’ a book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, chronicled the 2008 election and was particularly brutal to McCain’s running mate, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
Revelations including her lack of awareness that South and North Korea were different countries and her belief that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 terror attacks made McCain’s vice presidential choice look amateurish in hindsight.
The book eventually became a 2012 HBO film, helped along by a former McCain senior adviser who was merciless to Palin.
‘My own campaign manager was part of a book that trashed me. Steve Schmidt was one of the big contributors to Game Change,’ McCain recalled in his Equire interview.
Clinton’s list of scapegoats for her 2016 loss include then-FBI Director James Comey, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Wikileaks and Bernie Sanders.