DNC head: Clinton wasn’t ‘backtracking’ on coal

The chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee on Tuesday denied that Hillary Clinton is backtracking from her past remarks on coal.

“In saying she made a misstatement, I don’t think she was backtracking on the substance of what she said,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) told CNN’s “New Day.”

{mosads}“When you say something that comes out in a hurtful way, you want to make sure that people understand that you still care about them, that you’re not just discarding them or don’t care about how the changes are going to affect their lives,” she added.

“Good for her for sitting down with people who really are deeply concerned about how their jobs and their industry is going to transition as we try to reduce our carbon footprint and address climate change, [while] not completely [putting] people out of work at the same time.”

Clinton outraged the coal industry in March by suggesting her clean energy strategies would shrink the industry.

“I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring about economic opportunity — using clean, renewable energy as the key,” she said at the time. “We’re going to put a lot of coal companies and coal miners out of business. We’ve going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people.”

Clinton on Monday said she would institute economic policies that counter the “tragedy” of the coal industry’s downturn.

“That’s why I think we need a national effort to help, and that’s because I think we owe people in this part of the country a lot, and I don’t want to walk away,” she said in Ashland, Ky.

Clinton’s $30 billion plan would create alternative jobs in coal country, protect health and pension benefits for retired miners and invest in clean-energy technologies.

She concludes a two-day swing through Kentucky and West Virginia on Tuesday ahead of Democratic presidential primaries there later this month.