WASHINGTON – Hillary Clinton was so confident she’d become the first female president of the United States that she only drafted a victory speech for Election Day and said after the stunning loss to Donald Trump she’s “done with being a candidate.”
“I am done with being a candidate,” Clinton told CBS’ “Sunday Morning.” “But I am not done with politics because I literally believe that our country’s future is at stake.”
The former Secretary of State recalled in the interview that as the election returns began to come in, she couldn’t muster a concession speech because she hoped Trump’s electoral college wins would somehow be a mistake.
“It still is very painful,” Clinton said.” “It hurts a lot.”
On election night, she sent out campaign chairman John Podesta to tell her throngs of supporters at the Javits Center to go home.
“I had not drafted a concession speech. I’d been working on a victory speech,” Clinton said.
She retreated and hoped this nightmare scenario would pass: “I just kind of went in the bedroom, laid down on the bed, just thought, ‘Okay. I just have to wait this out.’ But then, midnight, I decided, ‘well - you know, looks like it’s not going to work.’”
The interview coincides with the release of Clinton’s new memoir about her loss to Trump, called “What Happened.”
She spent the last 10 months recovering – walking in the woods, doing yoga and writing a money-making book. She penned the memoir on the dining room table of a guest house the Clintons had bought to accommodate staff and security for what they thought would be a second Clinton Administration.
“Well I know a lot about what it takes to move a president,” Clinton said of the second home purchase in Chappaqua.”And I thought I was going to win.”
She had cast blame on others for her loss – including former FBI Director James Comey and Democratic primary opponent Bernie Sanders - but fesses up to her use of private email server as Secretary of State that prompted an FBI investigation into classified email.
“The most important of the mistakes I made was using personal email,” Clinton said.
Clinton said she realizes her campaign strategy was all wrong for the moment.
She ran a traditional campaign and people didn’t want to hear her plans to fix things, they wanted a vessel to channel their anger, Clinton said.
She doesn’t think remarks against half of Trump supporters – calling half of them “a basket of deplorables” – cost her the election because Trump’s base was already energized and weren’t leaving him despite the crude sexual misconduct remarks he made.
“I thought his behavior as we saw on the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape was deplorable,” Clinton said. “And there were a large number of people who didn’t care. It did not matter to them. And he turned out to be a very effective reality TV star.”
Clinton suffered through the humiliation of attending President Trump’s inauguration and fuming that he didn’t use the speech to unify the country.
“So there I was, on the platform, you know, feeling like an out-of-body experience,” she recalled. “And then his speech, which was a cry from the white nationalist gut.”