Former Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D) has labeled President Obama a “corporatist.”
In an interview, Schweitzer criticized Obama for moving to the right as president, saying that for much of the last five years, he had been a corporatist.
He also warned that Hillary Clinton could do the same thing if she becomes president.
{mosads}“The question that we have is, will it be the Hillary that leads the progressives? Or is it the Hillary that says, ‘I’m already going to win the Democratic nomination, and so I can shift hard right on Day 1,’ ” Schweitzer said in an interview with The Weekly Standard.
“We can’t afford any more hard right. We had eight years of George Bush. Now we’ve had five years of Obama, [who], I would argue, in many cases has been a corporatist,” the former governor said.
Schweitzer is seen as a possible White House contender in 2016 as well, and he did nothing to bat down that idea in the interview.
“I didn’t say I was going to run for president in 2016, did I?” he said. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t, but I didn’t say I was. But it’s something I’m interested in.”
Many Democrats are wondering whether a challenger from the left would come out to compete with Clinton, who is the prohibitive front-runner in that race and leads every survey of the field.
A poll out this weekend of the landscape in early-primary state Iowa showed nearly 70 percent of respondents had no opinion of the governor, meaning he’ll have to work hard to raise his national profile in time for the race, if he decides to run.