Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reflected on her 2016 presidential campaign in an interview Wednesday, saying she “probably came across as too serious.”
“I’m a serious person, but I’m also a fun person, but I think I probably came across as too serious,” Clinton said on ABC’s “The View.”
{mosads}Clinton said she felt pressure to convey to voters that as the first female presidential nominee of a major U.S. political party she would be a serious president and commander in chief.
“I really believed that my job, especially as a woman and the first woman to go as far as I did, that I had to help people feel good about a woman in the Oval Office, a woman commander in chief. And so I may have overcorrected a little bit because sometimes people say, ‘Oh, why can’t you be like that, or why weren’t you like that?’” Clinton said.
“And I did feel a heavy sense of responsibility, and it was such that maybe I wasn’t as loose or open as I could have been. So I take responsibility for everything I didn’t do as well or my campaign didn’t do as well,” she added.
“The View” co-host Sunny Hostin told Clinton that she “can’t take responsibility for Russia” and that country’s role in the 2016 elections.
“I really believe that there were unprecedented events in this election, in the last election, I mean, that were beyond my understanding and nearly anybody else’s,” Clinton said.
Earlier this year, former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election found that Moscow sought to help President Trump win the race for the White House.
“When we started talking in the summer of 2016 about the Russians, you know I think most of the press and the public goes, ‘What is she talking about? You can’t go around making excuses.’ They didn’t understand the attach that we were unfortunately suffering,” Clinton said.
Clinton added that she has talked to “most” of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates and has warned them of voter suppression efforts and hacking. She mentioned former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who launched a voting advocacy group, Fair Fight Action, after she lost the November election.
“I’ve said, ‘Look, you could run the best campaign, you could be the nominee. But you could still lose because, number one, you could lose with voter suppression,’” Clinton said. “You had Stacey Abrams on, and she is a champion for ‘let everybody vote.’ And at the end of the day who wins, wins and who doesn’t, doesn’t. Or you could lose because of hacking and theft of material.”