Former Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer has taken another shot at Hillary Clinton:
Brian Schweitzer isn’t on board with the Hillary Clinton 2016 coronation.
The former Montana governor, in a Time magazine interview published Thursday, criticized Clinton for voting for the Iraq War and for being too cozy with Wall Street.
“You can’t be the candidate that shakes down more money on Wall Street than anybody since, I don’t know, Woodrow Wilson, and be the populist,” said the former Democratic governor, who ran Montana from 2005-2013. “You can’t be the one to say we’re going to focus on rebuilding America if you voted to go to the Iraq war. There were 30 some Democrats who voted against that.”
He also said he’s better suited for the White House than she is.
“Well, I think so, of course,” Schweitzer said when asked whether he’d make a better president than Clinton.
Here are a few other selections of interest from the interview:
On the Barack Obama presidency
I was very hopeful. I was like everyone else. I’m an idealist. And when Obama was elected, all of these things were going to happen. We were going to get out of these foreign entanglements. We were going to show the world that we were a country of laws, and we were going to close Guantanamo Bay. We were going to have a healthcare system that actually worked, that challenged expenses. But one by one, all that stuff was dashed.
(…)
On Hillary Clinton
You can’t be the candidate that shakes down more money on Wall Street than anybody since, I don’t know, Woodrow Wilson, and be the populist. You can’t be the one to say we’re going to focus on rebuilding America if you voted to go to the Iraq war. There were 30 some Democrats who voted against that.
On whether he would be a better president than Hillary Clinton
Well, I think so, of course. I think I have a background and a resume that isn’t just in government. But the time I was in government, I was a chief executive. And as I said to you before, you can go around Montana and ask people what they think of me and they will say, “Well I didn’t always agree with him, but I always knew where he stood and he was good with money.” That’s what they will say to a person. And I think there is one thing we all can agree on: they are not good with money in Washington, D.C.
(…)
On his strategy if he decides to get in the race
Look, if you wanted to make a big machine that matches the machine that is likely to be built around Hillary then you would have to have started eight years ago. But if the outcome is always known with a superior slow moving army then we would still be part of England and we would still have a king. And Hillary would be president, or whatever you have under a king, but certainly it would not have been Obama.
This is the second time in as many months that Schweitzer has taken a shot at Clinton. Last month, he hit her over her ties to Wall Street, using rhetoric that was obviously designed to appeal to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. At the very least, this would seem to suggest that he is at least thinking about getting into the Presidential race, and laying the groundwork for that with these efforts to draw distinctions with his party’s presumptive frontrunner. Even if he didn’t win, a Schweitzer campaign would make things very interesting in what otherwise is shaping up to be a pretty boring Democratic race.
