Hillary Clintons coal gaffe is a microcosm of her twisted treatment by the media [View all]

[ehrnst]

Back in March 2016, at a Democratic town hall in Ohio, Hillary Clinton made what was probably the best-known “gaffe” of her campaign. As part of an answer on energy policy, she said, “We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” This was immediately taken as a sign of her hostility to the working class and a confirmation of Democrats’ “war on coal.”

She now calls it the comment she regrets most, devoting an entire chapter to it in her new book What Happened. “The point I had wanted to make,” she writes, “was the exact opposite of how it came out.” She “felt absolutely sick about the whole thing.” (Ken Ward Jr. has some good excerpts from the chapter on his blog.)

Clinton was asked what she would do to support working-class voters who typically vote Republican. Here, for the record, is her full answer:

Instead of dividing people the way Donald Trump does, let’s reunite around politics that will bring jobs and opportunities to all these under-served poor communities. So, for example, I’m the only candidate who has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right, Tim? [Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) was in the audience.]

And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce energy that we relied on.

If all you knew about Hillary Clinton was these two paragraphs, there might be some legitimate doubt about what she meant in the offending sentence.

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/15/16306158/hillary-clinton-hall-of-mirrors