Whether she’s running for President or not — and it increasingly appears as if she is — former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is articulating the views of many independents, centrists in moderates when she says things like this:
Hillary Clinton on Thursday night blamed lawmakers who govern by ideology for sending the country careening from crisis to crisis.
Many independents, centrists and moderates won’t say “ditto” to that, but I’d bet they’d say: “Amen.”
Speaking at the 10th anniversary of the founding of the progressive Center for American Progress (CAP), Clinton said the group is needed now more than ever.
“We are careening from crisis to crisis instead of having a plan bringing people to that plan, focusing on common sense solutions and being relentless in driving toward them,” she said.
Specifically alluding to the government shutdown, Clinton derided the consequences when lawmakers use “scorched earth” tactics and operate in an “evidence-free zone.”
Clinton made similar remarks during a speech earlier in the week.“We’ve seen unfortunately what happens in our public debate when they occur in what I do call an evidence-free zone, where people make claims and arguments that have no basis in evidence but which are ideologically motivated, when politicians choose scorched earth over common ground, families have felt the consequences,” she said, citing furloughed workers and kids kicked out of Head Start programs.
Clinton, considered a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for president if she runs, made no allusion to a political run in her short, 10-minute remarks.
So if she runs it’d be Hillary Clinton — the second Clinton centrist Democrat — running against the image of not just partisans but rank ideologists. It’s a position that polls — for now at least — show would have strong appeal.
She’d run as the anti-Cruz.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.