Webb won’t criticize Clinton in interview

Former Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) refused to criticize former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a potential rival for the White House, on Sunday, instead focusing on his own concerns with the direction in which the U.S. is headed.

{mosads}”I don’t think it’s for me to talk about Hillary Clinton. I enjoyed working with her when I was in the Senate. For me, I don’t know what she’s going to do or if she runs what she would run on. I’m just very concerned about these issues for the country,” Webb said on “Meet the Press” Sunday morning.

“I’m very concerned about the issues of economic fairness and social justice,” he said when asked if he was to the left or to the right of Clinton. “I believe in certain principles that I put out and whether they are to the left or to the right, it doesn’t matter to me.”

Webb, a former Marine and former Republican with a populist streak, decided to run for the Senate in 2006 over his opposition to the war in Iraq. He’s been critical of both parties’ foreign policy, and continued his criticism Sunday morning.

“We’ve not had a clear articulation of what American foreign policy is basically since the end of the Cold War,” he said. “In terms of a clear doctrine we have been lacking that for a very long time.”

The former senator has said he’s considering a run for president. He laughed when asked if he would announce by the end of the year, saying he’s “taking it one day at a time.”

“What I’m trying to do is exactly the same thing that I did when I was thinking about running for the Senate and that is to identify the issues that America needs to focus on in order to regain the trust of the American people,” he said earlier in the interview.