Out of the mouth of Schumer

In the 2016 campaign, there was no one more loyal to Hillary Clinton than her one-time Senate colleague Chuck Schumer. He defended his fellow New Yorker and the race she ran at every turn. Which makes what Schumer said about Clinton over the weekend all the more intriguing.

"When you lose to somebody who has 40% popularity, you don't blame other things -- Comey, Russia -- you blame yourself," Schumer, the top ranking Democrat in the Senate, told The Washington Post over the weekend. "So what did we do wrong? People didn't know what we stood for, just that we were against Trump. And still believe that." Gauntlet thrown.

Remember that Clinton has laid her defeat in the 2016 election directly at the feet of Russia's meddling -- via a series of hacked emails -- and then-FBI Director James Comey's decision to re-open the investigation into Clinton's private email server."I take responsibility for every decision I make -- but that's not why I lost," Clinton told Recode's Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg in early June. In a May interview with CNN's Christine Amanpour, Clinton said: "I was on the way to winning until a combination of Jim Comey's letter on Oct. 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me and got scared off."

Schumer's comments to the Post are a direct rebuke of the idea that Clinton has pushed since the election: That she lost because of factors entirely beyond her control, not because of any flaw in her as a candidate or in the message she ran on. (It was "Stronger Together," in case you forgot.) Schumer is arguing that Clinton lost because she ran a campaign devoid of any real message other than "I'm not Donald Trump." 

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