Susan Sarandon is the latest to join the "Don't Blame Me" brigade.
Don't blame me, that is, for the crash and burn of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign last November.
The apparent prevailing theory among progressives is that Sarandon bears part of the responsibility for Hillary's crushing defeat on Nov. 8. As the U.K. Guardian reports:
Sarandon was a vocal supporter of Sanders as he ran against Clinton to become the Democratic pick for president. When he lost out on the nomination, she expressed her frustration and publicly endorsed the Green candidate Jill Stein instead, stating that she did not vote with her vagina. She had previously called Clinton “more dangerous” than Trump….
A cursory scan of Twitter shows a stream of bile all the way from the Will & Grace star Debra Messing to the author Kurt Eichenwald.
But now Sarandon seems to have decided that Trump is actually more dangerous than Hillary, and she's trying to make amends with Hillary's people–so:
“There’s been a really strong blame for a lot of things that are obviously not my fault.”
Sarandon is hardly the first to tell the media it's not her fault that Hillary lost. Her august company includes:
Lena Dunham. Her cri de coeur—in Rolling Stone–is the opposite of Sarandon's. Instead of don't blame because I didn't support Hillary Clinton, it's don't blame me because I did support Hillary Clinton. The Hill reports:
Dunham says it hurts to have people pin the blame on her for President Trump’s stunning win in November. “I backed Hillary Clinton when a lot of people in my age group were on the [Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)] train, so I was getting s[—] from the right for being a ‘libtard’ — and getting s[—] from young people for supporting what they saw as a corporate candidate. It was painful when people were like, ‘Hillary lost because Lena Dunham is such a bad example of liberalism.’”
“But everyone's scared and upset, and they need someone to blame,” the 30-year-old performer told the magazine. “It's easier to blame me than it is to, like, blame George Clooney for not giving enough speeches or whatever. You could go around pointing fingers in every f—–g direction in Hollywood if you wanted to.”
Vladimir Putin. Fox News reports on his end-of-2016 news conference:
“The Democratic Party lost not only the presidential elections, but elections in the Senate and Congress …. Is that also my work?” Putin said, according to the Russian news agency Tass.
Hillary's campaign aides. Here's the report from Politico:
On a call with surrogates Thursday afternoon, top advisers John Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri pinned blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss on a host of uncontrollable headwinds that ultimately felled a well–run campaign that executed a sensible strategy, and a soldier of a candidate who appealed to the broadest coalition of voters in the country.
They shot down questions about whether they should have run a more populist campaign with a greater appeal to angry white voters, pointing to exit polls that showed Clinton beat Trump on the issue of the economy. They explained that internal polling from May showed that attacking Trump on the issue of temperament was a more effective message.
They offered no apology for the unexpected loss.
So don't blame us.
This raises the inevitable question: Who then was to blame for Hillary's Nov. 8 election debacle? Could it be that it was…Hillary herself?