Clinton, Romney offer signs ’16 will be about economy

Associated Press

CORONADO, Calif.

Not yet in the presidential race, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mitt Romney already are previewing the likely focus of the 2016 campaign, a competition over who’s better able to boost paychecks for working Americans.

And that ostensibly populist message about wages and jobs for the middle-class? It’s what their potential rivals for the Democratic and Republican nominations — Jeb Bush and Elizabeth Warren, among them — are talking about, too.

It started Friday afternoon, when Clinton, who has been mostly quiet over the past few weeks as a GOP field of more than two dozen potential candidates jockeyed for attention, sent her first tweet in more than a month: “Attacking financial reform is risky and wrong. Better for Congress to focus on jobs and wages for middle-class families.”

Late Friday night, it was Romney’s turn. The wealthy former private-equity chief sounded almost nothing like the Romney of 2012, when he told voters “corporations are people, my friend,” and said to a group of rich donors that when it comes to the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay income taxes, “my job is not to worry about those people.”

Said Romney on Friday, “Under President Obama, the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse, and there are more people in poverty than ever before.”

Though it’s a clear shift for Romney to offer such a message, which sounds like something a Democrat such as Clinton might levy as an attack against a Republican nominee, Bush is kicking off his prospective bid with a similar approach. The former Florida governor puts “rising wages” front and center on the website of the political committee that’s essentially his campaign-in-waiting.

“Too many of the poor have lost hope that a path to a better life is within their grasp,” Bush’s site says. “While the last eight years have been pretty good ones for top earners, they’ve been a lost decade for the rest of America.”

As for Warren, who continues to the dismay of some liberals to insist she will not enter the 2016 race, her populist message about wages and income inequality may be pushing Clinton from afar. See Clinton’s tweet, which opened with a defense of Warren’s assault on Wall Street’s large investment banks, which has been at the core of her work in the Senate.