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USHillary Clinton calls Electoral College an 'abomination' in Netflix doc - Netflix's five-part docuseries, streaming now, also features former Vice President Mike Pence recalling how Trump asked him to overturn the 2020 Election.
Netflix's "The American Experiment" serves as both a crash course in U.S. history and a reflection on the state of American democracy as the nation nears its 250th anniversary.
The five-part docuseries, directed by Brian Knappenberger with Tom Hanks as executive producer, offers novice history buffs an extensive look into the establishment of American democracy. Similar to Ken Burns' "The American Revolution," viewers are taken on a journey through the country's early beginnings from George Washington’s adolescence and the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the ratification of the Bill of Rights and the Jan. 6 riots on the U.S. Capitol.
The new series teeters on a bipartisan ledge, carefully including conversations with political figures like former vice presidents Kamala Harris, Mike Pence, Al Gore; former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Republican Senator Ted Cruz. It also includes notable figures like Cherokee Nation principal chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. and state senators Lisa Blunt Rochester, Rand Paul and Ron Wyden.
Along with the good, the docuseries explores the unanticipated cracks in America's history, such as the nation's inhumane evils like slavery and the exclusion of Indigenous nations from policy, and its lasting impact.
Here are five takeaways from Netflix's "American Experiment."
Hilary Clinton Shares Choice Words About the Electoral College
Hilary Clinton still has strong feelings about losing the 2016 presidential race, particularly about the final tally of electoral college votes. “Well, I personally think the Electoral College is an abomination,” Clinton said, with a laugh, “For obvious reasons.”
In Episode 3, she discusses Alexander Hamilton's warnings of demagogic leaders and the founding fathers' creation of the Electoral College, a contested voting body which scholars have called "a compromise on top of a compromise."
Despite winning the popular vote in 2016, Clinton lost the Electoral College vote to Trump, which ultimately secured his victory. This has only occurred in four other cases: in 1824, 1876, 1888 and 2000.
“It’s a very bizarre feeling to know that nearly three million more people voted for you," Clinton said, "and a relic of compromises from the Constitutional Convention is going to prevent you from becoming president."
Mike Pence addresses the 2020 Election Results
In the final episode, Mike Pence recounts the moment President Donald Trump asked him to overturn the 2020 election results. Despite cries of a rigged election and a Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, Pence acknowledged he didn't have unilateral power in a letter to members of Congress, defied the president and certified the election.
"I'll always believe that I did my duty that day," Pence said. "To see to the peaceful transfer of power under the Constitution of the United States."
Pence said he drew inspiration from former Vice President Al Gore, who similarly lost the election and ratified the vote.
"My only purpose was to keep my oath," Pence added.
What Did Kamala Harris Say?
The former vice president focused on the debates that defined the country's founding and its ramifications on the present-day United States, omitting details about her 2024 presidential race.
In Episode 3, Harris discussed the early arrogance of the founding fathers who made proposals for America's independence and questioned who was entitled to freedom.
“When we talk about power… I still also believe in the power of our people to speak up and speak out against the abuses that they see,” Harris said.
Martin Sheen Voices George Washington
Martin Sheen, who famously plays President Josiah "Jed" Bartlet in "The West Wing," voices George Washington within the docuseries.
Voicing the first president of the United States is a unique casting that would pleasantly surprise fans of the nineties political drama who are eager to hear the "Grace and Frankie" actor in another presidential role.
Ted Cruz Quotes 'The Godfather,' Lisa Blunt Rochester Believes in the American Experiment
By the end of the docuseries, Ted Cruz references his favorite movie, "The Godfather," and the opening line, "I believe in America." He later alludes to his upbringing as the son of a Cuban immigrant, who was imprisoned, tortured, and upon arriving in Texas, washed dishes, making 50 cents an hour.
"When I was sworn into office in January of 2013, I stood on the floor of the Senate," Cruz said. "My hand was on my father’s Bible. In the gallery was my father looking down. He had tears running down his face and he said that day, ‘Only in America.’”
As the docuseries examines the country's 250th anniversary, it also questions whether the country can withstand growing partisanship and pressure. For Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester, who fights back tears in the episodes, the experiment is incomplete.
"Are we for some of us, or are we for all of us?" Rochester asked. "I’m not going to lean back. I’m not going to quit. I’m not going to stop. Democracy is worth it. It’s worth it.”
Boo hoo. So you figured your election would be a coronation and decided not to strategize according to the rules at play rather than the rules you wanted?
I have since 2016 blamed Hillary Clinton for the rise of Donald Trump. Literally everyone I've known for over 10 years could tell you I was saying it since then.
Had she let nature take its course, let the field be open and the best man won in 2016, we would have had a serious election, not what the Democrats went so far as to call a foregone conclusion, we are still seeing the press flail wildly trying to save face. The media is so brutally out of touch with what the people of this country actually want that in 2024, they lost the popular vote and every swing state to a candidate that they couldn't convince the population instigated an insurrection.
And all because Hillary wanted "her turn". Fucking thanks, Hillary.
What a fucking cunt. The Dems, since Trump got elected, have done nothing but try and take their ball home regarding the electoral college. It belies their contempt for the structure of this country and the processes that give the citizen a say in the world around him solely because it doesn’t grant them eternal total power.
I will acknowledge that I don’t have advanced knowledge of the history of the electoral college, but it seems to me to be the bulwark against less populated regions of the country getting no voice in larger elections due to the tyranny of the majority that live in population centers. What she’s asking for is to silence those voters — which she and other Democrats will never get flack for in the same way that Republicans get flack for things like the SAVE Act, which Democrats characterize as voter suppression when it isn’t.
I will acknowledge that I don’t have advanced knowledge of the history of the electoral college, but it seems to me to be the bulwark against less populated regions of the country getting no voice in larger elections due to the tyranny of the majority that live in population centers.
If there were a fairer way of determining elections, I'm sure someone might have proposed one by now that would get mainstream attention. I'm not saying the change would be made. My problem is the whinge when the EC didn't "do its job" by electing the right person, as if to say the rubes really don't deserve an equal voice to those in crowded population centers, and as if that strategy might actually yield the result that Hillary would have wanted; we have no way of knowing since people would probably think way differently about the way they vote if they didn't have to think in red state/blue state terms.
Hell, there's a part of me that is willing to feel a little sympathy for Hillary: she spent 30 years putting up with Bill's philandering, because being half of a power couple is really the only reason someone like Hillary would put up with him, to see her grand plans undone by Donald Trump. Which really is proof that nobody anywhere really wanted her to be President, and she should just get the hell over it already.
Because the press was lazy. They relied on outmoded polling methods that didn't take into account that fewer and fewer people had a landline phone. And they didn't bother looking at Clinton's actual viability as a candidate.
I'll just go ahead and say it: Hillary Clinton was a terrible politician. Wooden, a skeevy past, seriously entitled, and an inflated sense of her own influence. In 2008, she blew what should have been a layup in the Democratic primaries to an underfunded up-and-comer. She was elected Senator in New York on name recognition alone and did next to nothing. She didn't exactly cover herself with glory as Secretary of State.
The truth of the matter is that Hillary Clinton's support was a mile wide and an inch deep. She rigged the 2016 primaries to make her the prohibitive favorite from the start and then did the talk show circuit as if the entire campaign was a formality on the way to her coronation. Read Shattered, written by two NYT reporters embedded in her campaign. It's mind-boggling how this campaign lurched along with no real coherent ideas or organization. Because, in Clinton's mind, it wasn't needed.
Here's when I knew she would lose. In early April 2016, she was at some seminar and she said, "We'll have to shut the coal mines down." I remember hearing that and thinking, 'Well, there goes West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.'
There was no collective outrage in those states, no protests. But it crystallized a simmering resentment in Flyover Land. NAFTA and China's entry into the WTO had brutalized American manufacturing and, with it, blue collar jobs.
Used to be, every small rural town in America had a mill, a factory, a plant, a mine, or something similar. And to the people in those towns, they were good, solid jobs that helped put food on the table, a car in the garage, and a boat out on the lake.
But if you go county-by-county through the rural areas of the country and look at the number of jobs lost in those counties outside the cities, the numbers are staggering. So while the national press would run stories on the opioid crisis in rural America, they never really understood the deeper economic reasons why there was an opioid crisis in rural America. As if the yokels out in the sticks suddenly woke up one day and decided to become drug addicts.
I live in Birmingham, Alabama. A little blue island in a sea of red. One of the lowest unemployment rates in the country. The place has shucked a great deal of its stereotypes as a grimy, racist town that existed at the pleasure of United States Steel. Healthcare, banking, publishing, and a host of other industries thrive here now. Having crawled out of the crater that was the 1960s and 1970s, it dusted itself off and has patiently reinvented itself. It's now a nice, livable city in a lot of ways. Not perfect, but a success story nonetheless. A work in progress moving in the right direction.
Now, seventy miles down the road is a different dot on the map: Alexander City, a lovely small town on Lake Mitchell. You've likely never heard of it. But it was the home of Russell Corporation, maker of athletic wear. It's not Nike, but it's a respectable player in the industry. And Russell Corporation employed a lot of people--until it didn't. As in shuttered the local mills and moved the jobs overseas. Talladega County hemorrhaged 25% of its jobs in one fell swoop. And that wasn't a unique occurrence.
Hillary Clinton was the walking, talking symbol of the technocratic class that cost all those people their jobs. And, the hell of it? Those factory workers used to be the Democratic Party's bread and butter. Alabama's legislature was majority Democratic until 2011.
The Kentucky gubernatorial race in 2015 should have been a bellwether for the politicos. Kentucky is kind of a swing state. And the GOP candidate won handily. The NYT did some next-level pearl clutching about it, too. They wondered how the working class of a state could vote against a party that would give them so much government assistance, especially in the parts of the state where the coal mines shut down.
The writer never understood that all those voters, coal miners chief among them, were now voting Republican because the coal mines shut down. Total whiff by the national press on what should have been an essential clue as to how 2016 was going to go.
In truth, Donald Trump was the best-case scenario for the Democratic Party, an outrageous, corrupt parade balloon of a man with a past even skeevier than the Clintons. Had the GOP run someone who was actually sane and competent, Clinton would have been absolutely flattened. John Kasich was beating Clinton by 7 points in the head-to-heads as late as June of that year.
But while Hillary Clinton was busy appearing on talk shows such as The View, basking in their adulation and prattling on about God knows what, Trump understood one fundamental truth. All those blue collar workers were pissed that their livelihoods and respectability had been stripped from them by forces beyond their control. And he ruthlessly exploited it.
I wouldn't vote for Donald Trump with a gun to my head. But the press couldn't be bothered to get out of their little enclaves to talk to the voters who would. And so they were absolutely gobsmacked when the 2016 election didn't run according to their pat little script.
Hillary Clinton was a positively disastrous candidate. It seems like the political class and their cronies were the only ones who didn't care to see it.
Nigger that’s not the issue. You and your ilk are simply pissing yourselves because the election process does not let you dictate who gets the presidency, so you’d rather tear down the process to replace it with your own tyranny.
I will acknowledge that I don’t have advanced knowledge of the history of the electoral college, but it seems to me to be the bulwark against less populated regions of the country getting no voice in larger elections due to the tyranny of the majority that live in population centers. What she’s asking for is to silence those voters — which she and other Democrats will never get flack for in the same way that Republicans get flack for things like the SAVE Act, which Democrats characterize as voter suppression when it isn’t.
That's the entire point. The only votes that matter are the electoral college votes and the refusal to understand that was why people freaked out over Trump winning in 2016. Hillary is still a grade A bitch though.
Times like these makes me glad the whole US isn't run like LA and San Francisco. Complete utter shitholes thanks to its management.
Another reason that Hillary lost was because she was the pro-woke candidate. Appealed to Tumblrinas everywhere. That said, her loss kicked off TDS and ended up unmasking how utterly deranged the left really is. So she's to thank for that at least.
Boo hoo. So you figured your election would be a coronation and decided not to strategize according to the rules at play rather than the rules you wanted?
I have since 2016 blamed Hillary Clinton for the rise of Donald Trump. Literally everyone I've known for over 10 years could tell you I was saying it since then.
Had she let nature take its course, let the field be open and the best man won in 2016, we would have had a serious election, not what the Democrats went so far as to call a foregone conclusion, we are still seeing the press flail wildly trying to save face. The media is so brutally out of touch with what the people of this country actually want that in 2024, they lost the popular vote and every swing state to a candidate that they couldn't convince the population instigated an insurrection.
And all because Hillary wanted "her turn". Fucking thanks, Hillary.
2016 was a serious election. The first serious election in the country in a hundred years. The Establishment never lets nature take its course. They want to be able to pick the candidates on both sides. This is why they're endlessly frustrated that all their attempts to smear Donald Trump have only led to him being a two-term President.
The former vice president focused on the debates that defined the country's founding and its ramifications on the present-day United States, omitting details about her 2024 presidential race.
In Episode 3, Harris discussed the early arrogance of the founding fathers who made proposals for America's independence and questioned who was entitled to freedom.
Before I had any opinion on Trump, I hated Hillary if only for her naked entitlement. "Her turn", indeed. With that alone, I was going to vote against her regardless of who ran against her... The ensuing hilarity has just been a bonus.
2016 was a serious election. The first serious election in the country in a hundred years. The Establishment never lets nature take its course. They want to be able to pick the candidates on both sides. This is why they're endlessly frustrated that all their attempts to smear Donald Trump have only led to him being a two-term President.
I remember 2008 being a serious election, and we know this because technically, it wasn't Barack Obama's "turn". But he still absolutely trounced Hillary everywhere he went.
That could be forgiven in the minds of her team, of course. Obama, no matter what you think of him as a politician, was a generational candidate. His campaign was pristine. He barely set a foot wrong. He looked like a responsible adult as opposed to crooked, shady Hillary.
And that's where my sympathy for her ends. Most presidential candidates basically say, "I gave it my best shot" and ride off into the sunset. There's no room, politically speaking, that Hillary won't show up to suck the air out of (yes, yes, insert "BJ's for Bill" jokes here).
People think I'm sexist because I haven't liked a single female candidate put up for President or Vice President for all of my adult life. Which is odd, considering who said candidates are. It would make me sexist if I actually did like them.
I remember 2008 being a serious election, and we know this because technically, it wasn't Barack Obama's "turn". But he still absolutely trounced Hillary everywhere he went.
Yes and no. Remember that, whether it was Obama or Hillary, the special interests got what they wanted. There wasn't a good candidate for President in the '08 election.
Who is “us,” exactly? I’m for all US citizens in the US born to parents who were already US citizens at the time of their child’s birth, yes even the useless and destructive ones. I am against non-US citizens in the US, except as visitors who benefit the aforementioned subset of US citizens.
Honestly, among normal people, I think that was the sentiment that got Trump elected. For once and finally, we had a candidate with which we could tell the ruling class to go fuck themselves.
Pity it was Donald Trump, but on some level, everyone in politics that isn't a useful idiot knows that Trump was simply someone who didn't belong in the club breaching their golden gates, and that's why he's spent the last decade taking so much flack: it isn't that he's some sort of "fascist authoritarian" (which frankly, when Harris said it at the tail end of her campaign, sounded like a desperate plea for someone to finally believe it rather than an accusation held by substance), it's that the people in power so badly want you to believe it so that nobody would pay attention to what kind of greedy, sociopathic, even authoritarian assholes they were.
