CONCORD, N.H. — At the end of a town hall on Thursday here in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton initiated a “rapid-fire” round of questions, fielding one after the other in quick succession on a variety of topics: veterans, money in politics, nuclear weapons.
Then came a question about the Keystone XL pipeline.
“Ok, Keystone pipeline. One of my favorite issues,” Clinton said to laughter from a crowd of several hundred at the Concord Boys and Girls Club, her second stop of the day.
She began with her usual answer, one that has frustrated environmentalists bitterly opposed to Keystone: that, because she launched the review of the project as secretary of state, she will not detail her personal position on the pipeline until that process concludes, and until President Obama has made his final decision on whether to approve Keystone.
But in Concord, Clinton promised a voter she wouldn’t wait “too much longer" — and that, if the review process took much longer, she would issue her position anyway. She did not provide a specific time-frame, nor did she hint at what her stance might be.
“I can’t wait too much longer, and I am putting the White House on notice,” Clinton said at the town hall. “I’m gonna tell you what I think soon, because I can’t wait.”
Clinton suggested that Obama should have reached a decision on Keystone by now, or at least, so she expected. “I thought they would have decided way, you know, way by now,” she said. “And they haven’t.”
Clinton’s last addressed the pipeline in detail in late July, at another town hall in New Hampshire — this one in Nashua. There, a voter asked Clinton for a “yes or no” answer on Keystone. She explained her rationale for holding off, saying she didn’t want to “second-guess” Obama. “I want to wait and see what he and Secretary Kerry decide,” she told her questioner, Bruce Blodgett, a software developer from Amherst, N.H.
“If it is undecided when I become president, I will answer your question,” she said at the time.
In Concord, about a month and a half after the exchange with Blodgett, Clinton expressed new concern with the hold-up.
“I think we have to move toward clean renewable energy. So of course, I don’t want to see us exploiting unnecessarily new fossil-fuel deposits,” she said. “But I will tell you about Keystone Pipeline one way or the other if they don’t decide, you know, very soon.”
That was all Clinton offered before swiftly moving on to the next question.
“Ok, Putin…!”