Former President Bill Clinton privately expressed disappointment in his wife Hillary's unsuccessful 2016 presidential campaign, sharing his frustrations with a friend that it lacked effectiveness, as detailed in a recent book by Ryan Grim.

The 42nd president specifically criticized the campaign's emphasis on identity politics, which included efforts to portray Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) policies as sexist and racist through op-eds ghost-written by advocacy groups, during the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination against the senator, the New York Post reports.

“To the extent that the campaign tactic moved the needle at all, it likely pushed moderate voters paying only marginal attention to the campaign towards Sanders, who spoke like a normal person while Clinton began ascending into what her ally James Carville would later call, ‘faculty lounge speak,’” journalist Ryan Grim wrote in “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution."

“Former President Bill Clinton, surveying the landscape and the ham-handed efforts at identity politics was bereft, lamenting to a longtime friend in the fall of 2016 that Hillary’s campaign ‘could not sell p—y on a troop train,’” Grim added.

Hillary Clinton, who narrowly defeated Sanders in the Democratic primary but was defeated by Donald Trump in the general election, has admitted that her campaign was not flawless. However, she has also attributed her loss to several factors including misogyny, Russian meddling, and the FBI's probe into her use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State.

“I was on the way to winning until a combination of [former FBI Director] Jim Comey’s letter on Oct. 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me but got scared off,” Clinton said May 2017.

Clinton remarked, "If the election were on October 27, I would be your president," pointing to the event on October 28, 2016, when Comey informed Congress about the investigation into newly found emails. This came three months after the FBI's conclusion that Clinton had shown "extreme carelessness" in the email server case, yet did not recommend any charges against her.

In the same interview with Christiane Amanpour, when questioned about whether misogyny affected her campaign, Clinton agreed, stating, "Yes, I do believe it played a role... [misogyny] is indeed a significant factor in the political, social, and economic landscape."

Clinton is currently assisting President Biden in his 2024 re-election efforts, having recently hosted a fundraiser for the incumbent at her Washington, DC, residence last month.