Hillary Clinton at a coffee shop in LeClaire, Iowa
Hillary Clinton began her campaign tour Tuesday with a considerably low profile in Iowa, talking to a roundtable of about 20 students at a community college while 60 reporters looked on. Clinton seems to be embracing the populist messaging that Elizabeth Warren has popularized.
Jennifer Jacobs reports:
Clinton hit on points that catered to the liberal base in Iowa, saying the economy has improved, but "it's fair to say the deck is still stacked in favor of those already at the top. There's something wrong with that. There's something wrong when CEOs make 300 times more than the typical worker.
"There's something wrong when American workers keep getting more productive, as they have, and as I just saw a few minutes ago is very possible because of education and skills training, but that productivity is not matched in their paychecks," said Clinton who took a tour of the college.
"And there's something wrong when hedge fund managers pay lower tax rates than nurses or the truckers I saw on I-80 as I was driving here over the last two days," she said. "There's something wrong when students and their families have to go deeply into debt to be able to get the education and skills they need in order to make the best of their own lives."
This is the Clinton we like to see—touching on themes the progressive base is hungry to hear about. It's also a good venue for her, probably better than the big arenas that were the order of the day in 2008. In 2000, when Clinton was a transplant to New York, she managed to win her Senate seat by going on a listening tour. New York City may not have been a tough sell for her as a politician, but the more conservative regions of upstate New York certainly were and Clinton won them over.
Whether she can recreate that type of retail politics with a circus of reporters whizzing around her is still in question. But Tuesday seemed a good start.