Hillary Clinton is now pointing her finger at the eight years of former President Barack Obama as a reason she couldn’t campaign on an “agenda of change” and conceivably win the 2016 election. Obama actively campaigned for his former secretary of state throughout the election campaign.
In an interview posted Wednesday with radio host Hugh Hewitt, Clinton bemoaned being seen as an extension of the Obama years.
“It is true that when you run to succeed a two-term president of your own party, you have a historical headwind blowing against you,” Clinton told Hewitt. “It’s not just this campaign can be set apart from everything that’s ever happened in our politics. It is a challenge.”
Clinton suggested her campaign suffered from mixed messaging.
“If you are both the candidate defending a lot of the areas of agreement, but also putting forth an agenda for change, which is what I tried to do, it is often difficult to get the second part of that message through.”
Not that she wanted to distance herself from Obama. “I was proud to serve in the Obama administration. I did not agree with everything that President Obama decided, but on balance, I really think he did what had to be done to rescue the economy, which as we all remember, was in desperate straits,” Clinton said.
The former first lady also suggested that she is far from finished with public life. Getting into the spirit of Thanksgiving, Clinton was asked what she is thankful for in 2017.
“I will be thankful for the opportunity to continue my service on behalf of the causes and values that are important to me,” she said.
Despite her misgiving about messaging, Clinton says she continues to have a “high regard for the campaign that we put together, and all of the people who were working in it so hard.”
The failed presidential candidate continued to differentiate her campaign from that of Donald Trump, whom she described as “the first reality TV candidate,” while she insisted she was “for better or worse, the candidate of reality.”