Hillary Clinton is known for being politically cautious to a fault. But no one expected the non-answer that she gave at a town-hall meeting in New Hampshire this week when she was asked her stance on building the Keystone XL pipeline.
“If it’s undecided when I become president, I will answer your question,” Clinton said. “This is President Obama’s decision. I’m not going to second-guess him.” She claimed that because she oversaw the process of analyzing the pipeline while she was secretary of state (the pipeline would begin in Canada) she had to in some way recuse herself from expressing an opinion.
#related#Hmmm. That logic certainly didn’t apply when it came to the Iran nuclear deal, which she almost immediately endorsed as soon as the ink was dry even though she was intimately involved in that “process” until 2013 and the deal’s fate has yet to be determined by Congress.
On Keystone, Clinton simply doesn’t want to take a position because endorsing it would infuriate the environmental lobby. According to the Pew Research Center, “solid” liberals oppose the pipeline 57–30 percent. But if she opposed it she would anger private-sector labor unions who want the jobs the pipeline’s construction would bring.
It turns out that Keystone is one of six issues where Hillary has decided to take a Profile in Obfuscation by not taking a position. The others are offshore oil drilling, fracking, trade, repeal of the Obamacare medical-device tax, and big bank regulation. The Washington Post has a hilarious rundown on her non-positions.
I can’t wait for the first debate between Hillary and her opponents to see if she maintains her absurd distance between the issues and a willingness to state an opinion on them.