Let me just start of by saying, that in a CNN Town Hall in March of this year, Hilary Clinton, in my opinion, was trying to say the approximately following: Note: Not her actual quote
“We are going to create so many jobs in coal country, that we are going to put a lot of coal companies out of business, because of lack of employees,…..” Something along those lines.
What she actually said was as follows:
CLINTON: Well, first of all, I was happy to carry those states you mentioned, and I carried the white vote in those states too, that voted Democratic now, I don't want to get carried away here.
Look, we have serious economic problems in many parts of our country. And Roland is absolutely right. Instead of dividing people the way Donald Trump does, let's reunite around policies that will bring jobs and opportunities to all these underserved poor communities.
So for example, I'm the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right, Tim (ph)?
And we're going to make it clear that we don't want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.
Now we've got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don't want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.
She has been getting a lot of flack, unfairly in my opinion, for the highlighted sentence which does not reflect the overall message. She is correct in saying we need to move away from fossil fuels.
Now during a round table event in West Virginia this Monday, she said the following:
“I don’t know how to explain it other than what I said was totally out of context for what I meant because I have been talking about helping coal country for a very long time,” Clinton said. “It was a misstatement because what I was saying is the way things are going now, they will continue to lose jobs. It didn’t mean that we were going to do it. What I said is that is going to happen unless we take action to help and prevent it.”
“Now I can’t take it back, and I certainly can’t get people who, for political reasons or personal reasons, very painful reasons, are upset with me,” she said. “What I want you to know is I’m going to do everything I can to help, no matter what happens politically.”
First off, she needs to own the statement, and not make statements that directly contradict previous statements. She can’t use the statement “It didn’t mean that we were going to do it.” if your refuting the statement “we're going to put a lot...”, because you are directly contradicting the actual words you used and that never looks good.
More importantly, there is absolutely nothing wrong with saying we are moving away from coal and are going to create better, more sustainable jobs. Just own it and stick to it already.
Don’t back-peddle and say your trying to save coal mining jobs if you don’t mean it. Coal jobs are most likely not coming back, and people know it.