Hillary Clinton signaled at a campaign event on Wednesday that she was ready to stake her White House hopes on a defense of Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law, potentially putting her on a collision course with Republican candidates who have said they would seek to repeal the law as one of their first acts in the Oval Office.
“I am committed to trying to build on what works in the Affordable Care Act,” Clinton said at a meeting with small-business owners during an event at a fruit distributor outside Des Moines, Iowa. “Because 16 million people now have insurance who didn’t have it.”
In an event that was highly scripted with pre-selected participants, Clinton ticked off a list of progressive causes that made up a platform perhaps better suited to the Democratic primary – in which she currently stands alone, at least officially – than the general election to come, where the former secretary of state will face a Republican showdown over so-called “Obamacare” and more.
She heaped paragraphs of praise on Equal Pay day (the campaign day highlighting attempts to achieve salary parity for women), called for immigration reform and singled out healthcare as one piece of the Obama legacy worth protecting.
The event was the latest stop in a painstakingly low-key rollout of Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Clinton’s visit to Capital City Fruit in Norwalk, Iowa, a suburb of Des Moines, followed an event on Tuesday at a community college in which she stumped for education loans – but also made a bold move on campaign finance, calling for a constitutional amendment to get “unaccountable money” out of politics.
Clinton used the appearance at the fruit distributor to call for immigration policy reform, saying that undocumented workers were “are all over this state, every other state … you know it, I know it.”
“We are really missing out on economic opportunities because we haven’t been able to agree on comprehensive immigration reform,” Clinton said. “We are turning down people who really want to work. They are here to work.”
Clinton praised “all the important changes” in the insurance market that had resulted from Obama’s healthcare law.
“One of the most important features … is to prohibit insurers from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions,” Clinton said. “That is so important. I will defend all the important changes in the Affordable Care Act.”
Clinton’s call to clean the stables of campaign contributions prompted the New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, a potential rival for the presidency, to pounce at a rival campaign event on Wednesday in New Hampshire. Speaking at a town hall, Christie held up for ridicule the idea that Clinton was going to reform campaign finance while simultaneously raising the billions of dollars her campaign is expected to spend.
Clinton might raise as much as $2.5bn, “but she wants to then get the corrupting money out of politics”, Christie said mockingly, Time magazine reported. Christie said he favored removing all caps on declared contributions.
In Iowa on Wednesday, Clinton told small-business owners that she wanted to hear their ideas for growing the economy so that they “can be embedded in all I’m proposing”.
“I want to figure out how to get workers the skills they need for the jobs of tomorrow,” Clinton said. “I want to hear from people who are on the frontlines, in this case small business,” she said.
Clinton used the event to casually display an understanding of the local economy, although she admitted to hearing some things for the first time.
“How much debt did you graduate with?” she asked one event participant, a recent college graduate who had bought a bowling alley. “The average four-year graduate in Iowa graduates with $30,000 in debt.”
The graduate replied that the $40,000 of student debt he carried had made it harder for him to take out a loan to start his business. Clinton thanked him for the insight, saying she had never made the connection before between student debt and lagging entrepreneurship.
The event was staged around a large square table on the concrete floor of a refrigerated warehouse, with 30ft high stacks of boxed fruit – Neapolitan cherry tomatoes, Capital Brand watermelon – as the backdrop. Capital City Fruit distributes fruit from Canada, Mexico and the United States and has operated since 1949.
Clinton wrapped the event with an appeal to patronize the businesses represented at the roundtable. “Everybody needs to go bowling,” she said.
After the event, Clinton was scheduled to meet at the state Capitol with the state’s Democratic caucus, including the attorney general, Tom Miller, and state treasurer, Mike Fitzgerald.
Clinton, her campaign aides and secret service agents drove a van more than 1,000 miles to her campaign appearances in Iowa, collecting anecdotes along the way. “I saw hundreds of trucks on I-80,” she said Wednesday. “And they were all headed to deliver something that somebody’s waiting to get!”
Clinton was scheduled to fly home to New York.
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