SIOUX CITY, Iowa – Hillary Rodham Clinton unleashed some of her sharpest class-based rhetoric yesterday, as Barack Obama stepped up his efforts to paint the front-runner as a creature of Washington.
“It is not rich people who made America great, it is hardworking Americans,” Clinton told a crowd of 2,000 activists at a Labor Day picnic in Sioux City, Iowa.
Later, at a labor rally in Des Moines, she inveighed against the “concentration of wealth, hoarding of power [and] smearing [of] dissenters” for which she blamed the present administration.
Hubby Bill Clinton, his voice raspy after a day of campaigning in New Hampshire, said his wife’s plan would “restore the middle class.”
Meanwhile, speaking in Manchester, Iowa, Obama tried to undermine Clinton’s repeated claims of having the most experience, warning about “divisive, special-interest politics.”
In a shot at Clinton, he said, “There are those who tout their experience working the system in Washington. But the problem is the system in Washington isn’t working for us, and it hasn’t been for a very long time.”
Clinton said she is already planning her first war council to coordinate the withdrawal of troops from Iraq after she’s elected, just as President Bush met with his war council on his unannounced Iraq trip.
Clinton said, “As soon as I’m president, I’ll call the Joint Chiefs of Staff together, my secretary of defense, my security advisers,” and give them a simple directive: “Start planning now to bring [the troops] home as soon as we responsibly can.”
She added: “I’m going to ask distinguished Americans of both parties, including my husband” to jet to foreign lands to deliver the message: “America is back.”