ABC News recently published the story “Sanders Says Clinton Comments in Leaked Audio ‘Absolutely Correct’”. But Sanders was not responding to all of Clintons comments in the full 49 minutes of leaked audio. (I expect he would disagree with a lot of it). He was responding to a small edited portion of the leaked audio that ABC played him.

I’ve highlighted in bold the audio that was cut from the middle of ABC’s excerpt. It’s nowhere near as dramatic an edit as PBS’s cut of Jill Stein. But I think it is still worth sharing and reflecting on.

…Some are new to politics completely. They’re children of the Great Recession. And they are living in their parents’ basement. They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves. And they don’t see much of a future. I met with a group of young black millennials today and you know one of the young women said, “You know, none of us feel that we have the job that we should have gotten out of college. And we don’t believe the job market is going to give us much of a chance.” So that is a mindset really affecting their politics. And so if you’re feeling like you’re consigned to, you know, being a barista, or you know, some other job that doesn’t pay a lot, and doesn’t have some other ladder of opportunity attached to it, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing…

I believe the removed section is the most important part. Clinton shares the fact that young people “do not see much of a future” regardless of whether they went to college or not. And despite generalizing all millennials down to “living in their parents basement” (in a similar way Trump refers to all black people as unable to “walk down the street without getting shot”) it really does seem like she’s trying to empathize. But then, in the last sentence ABC cut, Clinton refers to the political discontent of millennial’s to be the result of a “mindset”.

Clinton says the political discontent of millennials is the result of a “mindset”.

Millennials, like myself (and plenty of older people too), support real progressive politics, not because of a mindset. But because of REALITY. People cannot find jobs because jobs are not available. And when work does become available, it is predominantly low wage part-time work, that does not provide anything close to financial security.

Some interpret Clinton’s words as an attempt at empathy but a closer analysis reveals how far removed from our reality she is. Not because she’s a robot. But because she flies around our country in private jets; she speaks at closed door fundraisers where people laugh at young people for living with their parents; and she knows no matter what happens, she and Bill have a net worth of well over $100 million. Clinton is too far removed to even begin to truly empathize with the rest of us.