Searching for Hillary's big idea

The early consensus in Democratic circles is that Clinton’s best bet is a campaign about the economic challenges that will remain after Obama’s presidency, either income inequality — which Clinton is already mentioning with increasing frequency — or the general problems of the middle class, according to interviews with a dozen Democratic strategists and policy thinkers.

That’s the best way for her to play to her strengths, the strategists and policy experts say, since she has been talking about income inequality for years and can also talk about the economic growth that helped middle-class Americans during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

She’d have to decide which issue should get more weight, since that’s one of the biggest simmering disagreements among Democrats. The more populist ones think inequality is the bigger issue right now, and Clinton herself has been talking about it more than she used to. But the centrists and some Bill Clinton alums say the middle class is more important — and the former president is reminding Democrats not to overlook middle-class concerns, saying in a speech that “the absence of social mobility is a far bigger problem than income inequality.”…

“We survived the recession — now, how do you get the economy from second gear into third gear?” said Jim Kessler, senior vice president for policy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank. He said there’s “no one better in the Democratic Party” to lay out the next steps in 2016: “She was part of an administration that understood the economy extraordinarily well.”