Hillary Clinton is smart, tough, experienced and “someone who could go into the Oval Office tomorrow and start the job,” Terry McAuliffe, her campaign chairman, told a small group of Denver voters this afternoon.
McAuliffe was joined by Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Denver, in what was billed as a roundtable discussion for undecided voters. The one-hour conversation centered largely around her campaign’s familiar talking points of experience, providing universal health care and having taken the Republican Party’s best shots for more than a decade.
The five people who showed up asked how electing Clinton would end the partisan stand-off in Washington, D.C., questioned whether Democrats should have moved to impeach President Bush when they assumed control of Congress last year and wondered if people drawn to the election as a result of Barack Obama’s candidacy might be better for the party in the long run.
“Anybody who is motivated right now is going to be motivated for either one of them,” DeGette said.
While national and state polls show the economy as the top issue on voters’ minds, the topic didn’t come up until about the 45-minute mark of Saturday’s discussion. Instead, voters were more interested in discussing Clinton’s electability compared to that of Obama, who has built his campaign on the notion of “change.”
“This is being billed as experience vs. change, and I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive,” DeGette said. “There is not a Democrat in Washington who doesn’t want change.”
“Don’t tell me electing the first woman (president) won’t be change,” McAuliffe said later.
DeGette opened the discussion by touting Clinton’s plan for bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq while stabilizing the country, and highlighted the New York senator’s experience.
“When Bill Clinton was first elected he suffered a bit from a lack of knowledge. I think it even took him a while to get comfortable in the job,” she said. “Frankly, I don’t think we have that kind of luxury.
Three days before what’s billed as Super Tuesday, McAuliffe said the Clinton campaign has been “doing great,” adding that Clinton spoke to crowds of 10,000 people in both San Diego and Los Angeles this weekend.
McAuliffe had been in the Golden State, but traveled to Colorado early Saturday for a series of events in El Paso County, Highlands Ranch and Denver. A hectic travel pace is nothing new for the former Democratic Party chairman, who said his work on the Clinton campaign has been putting him in eight cities a week for the last 13 months.
In touting Clinton’s candidacy, McAuliffe said she is “the least partisan person” he knows and that she will deliver on her signature issue – universal health care.
“We’ve got to get everybody covered,” he said. “She knows health care better than anybody and can do that.”
On the financial side, he said Clinton outlines her plans to pay for all of the new spending she proposes, which includes letting the Bush tax cuts expire. Those tax cuts have largely benefitted the top 1 percent of wage-earners, McAuliffe said, which is a group to which he belongs as a result of several successful business ventures by the time he turned 35.
He said Bush had given him six tax cuts, and that he’d be happy to see his rates increase to pay for things like health care for children.
McAuliffe noted Friday’s news that Exxon-Mobil had just completed the most profitable quarter ever for a U.S. company, adding “Those are your tax subsidies that are doing that.”
On the issue of electability, McAuliffe said in Clinton’s re-election bid, she carried 38 of 40 New York counties won by George W. Bush. Nationally, he said, polls show her ahead in 11 states that voted for Bush in 2004.
Clinton has also “been through the wars” and has been taking the GOP’s best since Bill Clinton was president, he said.
