U.S. Sen. Hilary Clinton, D-N.Y., was the special guest who spoke at a convention for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in Des Moines on Friday night.

Clinton, a presidential candidate, said overall the country was going in the wrong direction and the country was “ready for a change” and needed to “get back on the right track.”

“Number one, we’ve got to have universal health care,” she said.

She said her plan was to have good quality and affordable health care for everyone.

Clinton said she was in full support of labor unions as they are “essential to continuing and growing the middle class.”

“If you stand in the way of organizing and bargaining collectively, you are essentially undermining the middle class in America,” she said.

Clinton said over the past six years “we’ve had an experiment in extremism. We’ve got to change direction.”

One of those changes, she said, was bringing the troops home from Iraq.

Clinton said the Iraq war was “George Bush’s war” and she, along with fellow Democrats, will continue to their effort to persuade the president to end the war.

Dependency on foreign oil is another thing Clinton said she wants to get away from.

“We cannot afford to keep spending billions of dollars that go to regimes that don’t like us and [are] working against us,” she said

Clinton said combating global warming would be an environmental and economical opportunity. She said it creates jobs in alternative energies such as wind and hydro as well as biofuels.

Clinton said Iowa has done well in investing money in new energy and gave credit to former governor Tom Vilsack and current Iowa Governor Chet Culver for putting money into the programs.

“If America were as far along on energy independence as Iowa is, we wouldn’t be creating those jobs,” she said.

Clinton said she wants to end the government no-bid contracts and to quit outsourcing the government to private contractors. She said there were 500,000 contract employees that she would end, saying they were not cheaper.

She also favors repealing the Bush tax cuts and giving more tax cuts to the middle class. She stated that over the past six years, the median family income dropped $1,300.

Clinton said she wants a more fair and balanced system that benefits the middle class because that, she said, is what makes the country.