WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton on Tuesday laid out an ambitious agenda for the first 100 days of her presidency, if she’s elected, that includes signing legislation that President Bush vetoed, seeking a moratorium on home foreclosures and beginning the process of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.
Her rival Barack Obama spent Tuesday courting union workers and veterans, both important constituencies in Pennsylvania, which holds its Democratic primary next Tuesday.
Speaking at an American Society of Newspaper Editors luncheon in Washington, Clinton said that she’d ask Congress to eliminate some of Bush’s tax cuts — replacing them with reductions targeting the middle class — and press Canada and Mexico to renegotiate parts of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
“In short, starting from Day One, the Bush-Cheney era will be over in name and practice,” the New York senator said.
Clinton said she’d start with bills that Bush had vetoed, beginning with measures to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and the use of embryonic stem cells for research.
“We will provide health insurance for millions more of our children as a down payment on achieving health care for all Americans with no exceptions,” she said.
Clinton told the editors she’d convene a meeting of mortgage lenders, banks, community organizations and regulators to negotiate an immediate freeze on foreclosures.
“So many Americans are hurting, the projection is that more than 2 million American families will be foreclosed on this year,” she said.
She vowed to restore “fiscal sanity” to Washington by cutting taxes for middle-class families by $100 billion a year and ending tax breaks for oil companies, drug companies, insurance companies and Wall Street firms, saving $55 billion annually.
On climate change, Clinton said she’d convene a summit within her first 100 days to negotiate an international climate-change treaty to replace the Kyoto accords and include China, India and other rapidly developing greenhouse gas-emitting nations.
On Iraq, she vowed to convene a meeting to begin drawing up plans to withdraw troops “responsibly and carefully” starting within 60 days of her inauguration.
