Hillary falling flat with Blasio
Mayor: Where’s the vision, Clinton?
Even after delivering a campaign speech packed with eat the rich rhetoric, Hillary Rodham Clinton was still unable Sunday to win an endorsement from her far left leaning former protégé, Mayor de Blasio.
“I’ve been waiting to hear a vision,” de Blasio said. “She’s doing more each time to give us a clearer picture, and I’m very optimistic, but we’ve got to see the plan of how she’s going to turn around this horrible income in equality problem.”
In her Saturday campaign kickoff rally on Roosevelt Island, Clinton pledged support for gay rights, universal preK, paid family leave and higher wages for workers — all while vowing to keep corporate CEOs and hedgefund managers in check.
But it wasn’t enough for de Blasio, who seeks to be a progressive kingmaker.
“It was a great speech,” he conceded, calling her “tremendously qualified.”
“I really commend her for what I thought was a powerful and progressive speech.”
Still, he said, he wants “to see those details.”
Clinton took another progressive turn Sunday by offering support for the Democrats, led by Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who together defied President Obama on Friday in sinking a key trade deal vote.
“The president should listen to and work with his allies in Congress, starting with Nancy Pelosi, who had expressed their concerns about the impact that a weak agreement would have on our workers to make sure we get the best, strongest deal possible,” Clinton told about 600 supporters in Iowa at her first public rally. “And if we don’t get it, there should be no deal.”
Clinton had been pounded from the right and left for failing to pick a side on whether to grant Obama fasttrack authority for an Asia trade deal.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, her rival for the Democratic nomination, said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the trade deal would be a “disaster” and that Clinton should “side with every union in the country” and oppose the measure.
Earlier Sunday, Rep. Paul Ryan called her silence on the issue “mystifying.”
“Pick a position; that’s what leaders do,” he said on “Fox News Sunday” after a Clinton spokeswoman punted the question.
Meanwhile, hubby Bill Clinton sought to build up Hillary’s trust after a poll found that more than half of Americans believe her to be dishonest.
“I trust her with my life,” he told CNN’s “State of the Union.”
And he dismissed allegations that his wife’s policies as secretary of state were influenced by foreign donors to the family’s Clinton Foundation.
“She was pretty busy those years,” Bill Clinton said. “I never saw her study a list ofmy contributors, and I had no idea who was doing business before the State Department.”
Also Sunday, Hillary Clinton sat for an interview with Radio Iowa in Des Moines, where she equated the attacks on her as “a strange form of respect and even flattery, because if they weren’t so concerned about me, they’d leave me alone.
“They get up every day, you know, worried that the case I’m making will break through,” she said.