Hillary Clinton is desperate to improve her plummeting poll numbers.
So much so, she’s flip flopping on big issues like “ObamaTrade” as she tries to walk a more liberal track to gain supporters from the party’s left flank.
According to Bloomberg:
“Hillary Clinton has drifted noticeably leftward on economics to fend off attacks from Senator Elizabeth Warren, who did not enter the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, and from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who did. On Oct. 7 she evencame out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation free-trade deal that her former boss, President Barack Obama, has made a centerpiece of his second term in office. That took away a potential bludgeon from Sanders, who had battered her fence-straddling on a trade pact that he says is “designed to protect the interests of the largest multinalational corporations.”
“You can see or sense a shift left relative to when she was Senator Clinton,” says Princeton University economist Alan Blinder, who is an outside economic adviser to the Clinton campaign. “It’s not a huge shift but it’s a shift.”
But Tuesday’s candidate debate in Las Vegas is likely to show that when it comes to the economy, Clinton is no Sanders. She remains a mostly centrist Democrat with a detailed set of policy proposals, while Sanders is a self-described democratic socialist who speaks in broad strokes about taking on “the enormous economic and political power of the billionaire class.”
The two leading candidates for the Democratic nomination are “telling very different stories about what’s going wrong and how to fix it,” says Mike Konczal, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute in New York. “Bernie is talking about CEOs and the One Percent and big finance and big corporations. Hillary’s trying to thread the needle with a story that’s all about that but also about opportunity and growth.”
Clinton was also blasted by many left wing outlets like Vox and the Washington Post for her blatant flip flop on TPP, better known as “ObamaTrade.” Clinton had been a strong supporter.
According to NBC News:
“Yes, Hillary Clinton’s new opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade accord cleans up something she needed to do before next week’s first Democratic debate…But make no mistake: This flip-flop isn’t believable at all. For starters, there was the time as secretary of state when she said TPP “sets the gold standard in trade agreements.” In her book, “Hard Choices” (which she sent out to all the GOP candidates), she called TPP “the signature economic pillar” of the Obama administration’s strategy in Asia.
And then there’s the wiggle room she left for herself, as well as the fact that she hasn’t even fully reviewed the trade accord because it’s not public yet. “I’m continuing to learn about the details of the new Trans-Pacific Partnership, including looking hard at what’s in there to crack down on currency manipulation, which kills American jobs, and to make sure we’re not putting the interests of drug companies ahead of patients and consumers. But based on what I know so far, I can’t support this agreement,” she said in her statement yesterday. And because this opposition is so unbelievable, it feeds every negative stereotype about her — despite the short-term political benefits.”
