WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Upon taking office in 2009, Democratic President Barack Obama identified himself with the towering figure in Republican Party history: Abraham Lincoln. And now his presumed successor, Hillary Clinton, wants to take on the mantle of another great Republican: Teddy Roosevelt, a progressive who fought the excesses of the most powerful corporations of his day.

In 2009, Obama saw himself, like Lincoln, as a president who mournfully led a nation divided against itself, a president who hoped to build a bipartisan team of rivals to heal the wounds. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out for Obama any better than it did for Lincoln. If we are any less divided now than we were in 2009, it’s only because we’ve exhausted ourselves in the battle.

Now we have another Democrat taking inspiration from a Republican.

Clinton defends response to request for more security

“It’s time to take a page from Teddy Roosevelt’s book and get our economy working for Americans again,” Clinton wrote in an op-ed in Quartz titled “Being pro-business doesn’t mean hanging consumers out to dry.”

In her op-ed, Clinton connected the dots between rising profits on one hand and rising inequality on the other, between decreased competition in most U.S. industries and lagging wages, between the laws, rules and regulations that favor Big Business and the sinking feeling most Americans have that this country is moving in the wrong direction.

Clinton promised to reinvigorate antitrust enforcement to ensure that Americans benefit from highly competitive markets that drive down prices, create innovative new products and services, and deliver a high standard of living to the workers and entrepreneurs who build a business. She promised to revisit the deregulatory tidal wave of the past 30 years that has allowed companies in industries as diverse as pharmaceuticals, airlines and broadband services to gouge the public with impunity. She promised to close tax loopholes that allow the biggest and most profitable corporations to evade hundreds of billions in taxes.

Clinton isn’t the only one who believes that Bigger and Bigger Business is one of our biggest threats. Her main rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders, has made this fight the centerpiece of his quixotic campaign that has resonated with voters much more than the pundits and politicos ever thought possible. His candidacy has certainly pushed Clinton to address those same issues.

This isn’t knee-jerk anti-business sentiment. The point isn’t to replace free enterprise with all-knowing government, but to fix a system that’s been rigged.

Clinton cited some fascinating research to support her claims, including this report by my colleagues Theo Francis and Ryan Knutson at the Wall Street Journal that showed that about two-thirds of publicly traded companies are operating in markets that are less competitive than they were 1996.

Consumers don’t necessarily suffer from less competition; consolidation can lead to cost efficiencies and even more consumer choice than in markets with stronger competition but weaker companies. But lack of competition also drives up profits and leads companies to engage in rent-seeking behavior that doesn’t create any value for customers or for our economy.

Jason Furman, chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, and former budget Director Peter Orszag (now at Citigroup and Brookings) have published an interesting analysis of our increasingly uncompetitive markets, showing that inequality may be driven in part by companies that are particularly good at rent-seeking.

Using McKinsey & Co. data, Furman and Orszag found that 10% of companies — most in health-care and high-tech — earn as much as 100% return on their invested capital!

It seems that what these companies are really exceptional at is consolidating once-competitive markets and then extracting rents from the rest of us. If rent-seeking blossoms in uncompetitive markets, then there’s a role for government to restore more efficient markets.

As Clinton said: “I don’t know what could be more pro-business than promoting competition and consumer choice.”

Now some, especially those on the left, may think that Hillary Clinton is the last person in the world to lead this fight. They see her as simply a shill of the rich donors who’ve funded her campaign, of the Wall Street banks who’ve paid her and her husband millions of dollars just to speak to them for a few minutes, of the billionaires who’ve financed the Clinton Foundation in hopes of gaining favor with the powerful Clintons.

It’s true the Clintons have a complicated relationship with the global elite. But so did John F. Kennedy, Franklin D. Roosevelt and, yes, even Theodore Roosevelt, whose election as vice president in 1900 was assured by the millions of dollars spent by big business on behalf of the Republican ticket.

Those who assume that Clinton has been thoroughly bought by Wall Street forget where she came from: She’s a product of the 1960s. She turned away from her early conservative beliefs as so many did in that era, shocked by the racism, sexism and poverty that was everywhere around her. She was an activist before she was a politician. She’s been a solid liberal (at least on domestic issues) ever since.

Of course, a fair bit of skepticism about her intentions is warranted. It’s easy for a candidate to promise to crack down on evil monopolists, dodgy tax evaders and mean price-gougers. Candidate Obama promised to install a more active antitrust division at the Department of Justice, but enforcement is little changed from the Bush years.

Still, it’s a hopeful sign that Hillary Clinton is making an issue of our dysfunctional economy, a system that produces world-class products but that fails to divide the spoils of success in a fair manner. It’s not only a winning political strategy, but a wise one as well.

Obama (and the Fed, of course!) has brought us back from the recession, but his successor will have to fix the thorny problems that lie at the very foundations of our economy. Now’s the time to debate those problems and what we can (or should) do about them.