http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=34338C6E-CC87-4116-A592-6DB6D25515FE Hillary Clinton tries to clarify jobs comment
By: Maggie Haberman
October 27, 2014 01:15 PM EDT
Hillary Clinton on Monday mopped up her botched statement from a rally in Massachusetts last week, making it clear she’d misspoken and hadn’t intended to deliver a fresh economic policy message.
Clinton’s 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 candidate’s Friday comment on social media and it began gaining broader attention.
“Don’t 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.
A Clinton aide later said the former secretary of state had meant to talk about tax breaks 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 didn’t build that.”
In Somers on Monday, Clinton called for a raise in the minimum wage and said, “Look, I know the Republicans will tell you raising wages kill jobs except for wages at the very top, so trickle-down can create jobs.”
But she noted that when her husband was president the minimum wage was raised, and that she voted for its increase when she served as a senator from New York.
“We are supposed to be about upward mobility,” she said.
Nan Hayworth, Maloney’s rival, represents “a discredited economic theory that will hurt middle-class families,” Clinton said. “I shorthanded this point the other day, so let me be absolutely clear on what [I’ve been saying for decades].
“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. … Not when we hand out tax breaks for corporations that outsource jobs or stash their profits overseas.”
Maloney, who talked extensively about getting his start in national politics by working on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential run, is one of the only House candidates Hillary Clinton is individually helping with a public rally.
The event, at Heritage Hills, a housing complex, was attended primarily by senior citizens.
In addition to the mop-up, Clinton tried out a few new lines, describing Maloney as part of the ongoing bridge to the 21st century.
He’s part of “a new political mission to make our government work again for the people of the country that we love,” said Clinton — another sentence that could end up as part of her own stump speech.
