In calling Hillary Clinton “wicked smart,” President Barack Obama veered about as close as he could to endorsing his former secretary of state. According to the president in a recent statement, Clinton is “extraordinarily experienced … and wicked smart and knows every policy inside and out,” he told Politico last Monday.
This means, he added, “she can govern and she can start here, day one.” Even so, he opined, this could make “her more cautious and her campaign more prose than poetry.”
Less than a week away from the Iowa caucuses, Clinton’s campaign is nowhere as certain of victory as it was back at the start. In fact, there are signs each day of an increased anxiety about her narrow margin over Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
Depending on which poll you consult, Sanders is ahead by several points or Clinton has a small edge. However, the national polls continue to place her in a double-digit lead over Sanders. When Clinton ran against Obama and John Edwards for the Oval Office in 2008, she came in third behind them in Iowa, with Obama going on to win the nomination and the presidency.
Clinton’s team on the ground in Iowa is patching up the holes from the previous run, banking on older voters while conceding the younger or first-time voters to Sanders.
As for Obama’s opinions about Sanders, he said that whatever he’s doing is “obviously working.” However, since Sanders tends to focus on economic issues, particularly Wall Street and income inequality, Obama believes that he doesn’t “have the luxury of just focusing on one thing.”
Sanders, the president said, “has tapped into a running thread in Democratic politics that says, why are we still constrained by the terms of the debate that were set by Ronald Reagan 30 years ago?”
While he feels there’s a certain amount of appeal to that tactic, he thought that Clinton presents a recognition “that translating values into governance and delivering the goods is ultimately the job of politics.”
Her having experience and an ability to get the job done were repeated at the town hall Monday evening in Iowa at Drake University. Sanders, as expected, kept to his singular beat, though pointing out that just because Clinton has the experience doesn’t “means she’s always right,” and he emphasized her wrong decision on Iraq.
What it seems to boil down to is the idealistic warrior that is Sanders pitted against the pragmatic Clinton. And, oh, by the way, Martin O’Malley, the other candidate, took off his coat.
