Washington: Nearly 10 months after her shocking defeat at the hands of President Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton has said that she was not ready or equipped to run for the White House against a reality television star.
The former Democratic presidential candidate said she had an agenda of development, but possibly there were no takers.
“I take running for president and being president really seriously. I really wasn’t ready or equipped to run for president against a reality TV candidate,” Clinton told PBS News Hour in an interview.
It may be the toughest job in the world, the 69-year-old former US Secretary of State, said.
“I knew that there was unfinished business from the successful two terms of President Obama, whom I had served, but that we needed to go further on the economy, on health care, and so much else,” she said.
“I really prepared and I prepared wanted I to say, how I would defend what I wanted to do. It turned out that was very hard to communicate. It was a time when an empty podium got more broadcast minutes than all of the policies that I was putting forth,” she said.
Clinton said it was clear that the kind of campaign she was running, and the seriousness with which she looked at the agenda, she wanted to represent and then execute “was just out of sync with the anger that a lot of the electorate felt, or the disappointment that another part of the electorate felt.”
In her latest book ‘What happened’, which will hit the bookstores this week, Clinton, the 67th US Secretary of State, appeared to be very critical of Trump.
“I believe that he has given a lot of encouragement and rhetorical support to the Ku Klux Klan. He accepted the support of David Duke. I believe that he has not condemned the neo-Nazis and the self-proclaimed white supremacists in Charlottesville and other settings,” she said.
“The Congress had to, on a bipartisan basis, pass a resolution asking that white supremacy be condemned by this president, which he then signed. And we will wait and see what he does. So, I can’t tell you what’s in his heart. I don’t know. It could be total rank, cynical opportunism. He’s got a hard-core base that believes these things, and he’s going to keep feeding it,” Clinton said.
Responding to a question, Clinton called for a full-court diplomatic effort against North Korea.
“We should have a full-court press diplomatic effort. If Trump doesn’t want to listen to the experts inside his own government, then go to people outside in think tanks and academia who know about this very complicated region, and particularly North Korea,” she said.
“Make it clear that we will do everything in our power to protect our allies, South Korea and Japan, including installing even more missile defence. Now, the Chinese don’t like that, but then the Chinese better be more on board with us in trying to rein in Kim Jong-un, Clinton said.
“The Japanese are not for long going to leave their defence against this aggressor in North Korea to us, when they can’t really rely on Trump’s understanding of our promises,” she said.
PTI