Combating growing economic inequality is the pre-eminent cause of the left – and Hillary Clinton isn't yet offering a clear prescription with how to deal with it. During an Aspen Ideas forum Monday sponsored by Facebook, the first question Clinton received was how she'd address the gaping wealth disparity between the richest and poorest Americans. [ READ: Is 'Hillary Fatigue' Setting In? ] The former Secretary of State acknowledged the gap, but failed to offer up a substantive solution. She called for a "concerted effort" built around "consensus," she warned that "it will only get worse" if left unaddressed, and she attempted to feel the pain of the malaise by channeling a whim of emotion of those hurting. "They feel like they're falling behind. At best, maybe they're running in place," she said. But for a politician who has stumbled in recent weeks in acknowledging her own wealth, Clinton is either unwilling or unprepared to dive into the guts of policy remedies that the left is looking for . Leading liberal groups are watching closely to see if Clinton will join their charge of expanding entitlements. Last year, she even appeared to flirt with supporting the idea of trimming entitlements to attain a grand budget bargain. Speaking at Colgate University last October, she said:



On Monday, she talked about the great American dream of an upwardly mobile, expanding middle class. "We don't want to see that lost," she said.

She even offered a throwback to the sunnier days of her husband's presidency, a period of unprecedented job growth and a balanced budget with a surplus.

"We know there are certain government policies that work better than other government policies," she said, leaving specifics for another day.

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Perhaps she's punting on the details because, as she said, she's still "thinking a lot about what we might do and how we might do it."

But it's telling that it was the least meaty of all of Clinton's answers – given the left's suspicions about her allegiance to Wall Street and unfettered capitalism.

On other hot topics, she was more precise. Here's a roundup of her Aspen answers:

On her reluctance to publicly renounce her support for the Iraq War: "I have … as my friends say, an overactive responsibility gene."

On the Supreme Court's decision in favor of Hobby Lobby: “I disagree with the reasoning as well as the conclusion … It's troubling a sales clerk at Hobby Lobby who needs contraception is not going to get that service through their employer health care plan because the employer doesn’t think she should use contraception."

On what she would have done differently with the Affordable Care Act: "There wasn’t anything else that could pass … I think the argument to repeal it is over.”

On the Mississippi Senate primary runoff result: "It's of major historical importance because the Republican Party expanded its base."

