Former US ambassador to Malta says ‘elitist’ Clinton ignored working families’ realities

Former American ambassador to Malta Douglas Kmiec, whose tenure on the island was cut short after being recalled following a State Department audit, has pinned the blame of Hillary Clinton’s electoral loss on her elitism.

Describing Donald Trump’s victory as “the end of the patience of the American working family”, Douglas Kmiec – a Catholic conservative who threw his lot behind Barack Obama in 2008 – said Clinton had “tossed her lot with the elites and smugly called the genuine concerns of working families merely the whining of racists or misogynists or others that she far too gleefully labelled deplorable, and uncharitably, irredeemable.”

Kmiec complained, in a post in the Huffington Post, that special interests in the USA had loaded the burden of taxation onto the middle class, and accused Clinton of having forgotten her own humble background.

“No doubt she thought she was reaching out to the disadvantaged and that her father and mother would also affirm the way she was choosing to help others. Yet, there is an important matter of public philosophy. In all likelihood, the Rodham parents would have done it within reasonable and personal means and not with a big government programme that ends up sending insurance premiums through the roof based upon a monopoly conferred on the United Health Group and other special interests,” Kmiec said of Barack Obama’s health insurance scheme.

Kmiec also accused Clinton of having sold herself out for “bribery-like blandishments that enriched her personally” with speeches to the Wall Street establishment.

“Apparently the enrichment led sadly to her seeing those struggling economically (whose real incomes had not risen over the last 18 years) as ‘deplorable’. Those who disagree with the policies of the elites are not racist or worse. Donald Trump represents a refusal to engage casually in this type of smug hatefulness.”