South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg on Sunday walked back critical comments he made about Hillary Clinton, saying he has “enormous respect” for the former secretary of state and that she was “ill-served by a strategy and media environment.”
"Just to make this clear, I think America would be a much better place if she were president," he said during an appearance on CNN affiliate WSBT. "That's why I voted for her and that's why I campaigned for her, and I have enormous respect for Secretary Clinton."
Buttigieg, who has emerged as one of the top candidates in the Democratic race for president, made the comments after Clinton Nick Merrill slammed him for telling the Washington Post in January that Trump won because “his twisted way, he pointed out the huge troubles in our economy and our democracy ... at least he didn’t go around saying that America was already great, like Hillary did.”
Trump, said Merrill, “ran on pessimism, racism, false promises & vitriol” while Clinton “ran on a belief in this country & the most progressive platform in modern political history.”
“This is indefensible,” he added.
Buttigieg in response told WSBT that people in the industrial Midwest perceived the 2016 Democratic candidate "as basically saying that everything was just fine, and we should just believe in the system. And that was unconvincing."
"And so even though people knew that the President was not a great character, I think a lot of folks voted for him just to kind of burn the house down because the system had let us down in so many ways," he continued.
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