Hillary Clinton clarifies jobs comment
Hillary Clinton on Monday mopped up her botched statement from a rally in Massachusetts last week, making it clear shed misspoken and hadnt intended to deliver a fresh economic policy message.
Clintons cleanup came as she campaigned with Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney in Somers, about 90 minutes north of New York City, after two days in which Republicans bandied the likely White House candidates Friday comment, made in the context of talking about trickle-down economics, on social media and the single sentence began gaining traction.
Dont let anybody tell you that corporations and businesses create jobs, Clinton had said at the rally in Boston, where she appeared on behalf of gubernatorial candidate Martha Coakley along with Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a populist, anti-Big Banks crusader who has become the wished-for candidate from some progressives for 2016.
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A Clinton aide later said the former secretary of state had meant to talk about tax breaks for corporations and businesses in that sentence, which led into a line about how trickle-down economics had failed spectacularly a sentiment she has long held. The overall context was clear that she had left words out of a sentence; the comment made little sense without it.
But some Democrats who back Clinton said privately she appeared to be trying too hard to capture the Warren rhetoric and adjust to the modern economic progressive language much in the way President Barack Obama did during a campaign rally in 2012, when, discussing businesses relationships to the infrastructure of cities, he said, You didnt build that.
And it highlighted a problem that has plagued Clinton in the past: overshooting in her language when she is outside her immediate comfort zone.
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In Somers on Monday, Clinton wrapped the discussion about trickle-down economics into one about the minimum wage, an issue Democrats across the country have discussed in stump speeches.
Trickle down economics has failed. I short-handed this point the other day, so let me be absolutely clear about what Ive been saying for a couple of decades, she said. Our economy grows when businesses and entrepreneurs create good-paying jobs here in America and workers and families are empowered to build from the bottom up and the middle out not when we hand out tax breaks for corporations that outsource jobs or stash their profits overseas.
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Hillary Clinton clarifies jobs comment