In yesterday's Outfront anchored by Erin Burnett, she and one of the panelists exchanged the below conversation:
Burnett: So, Van, Clinton was wrong technically in terms of there's been no evidence of video. Okay? Wrong on that. Does she owe Donald Trump an apology?
Van Jones, Former Special Adviser to President Obama: Well, I don't think so. First of all, she overshot the runway trying to make an accurate point. Lots and lots of terrorism experts have said over and over again, when you have the kind of bombastic rhetoric that Donald Trump has and increasingly other Republicans have, where it seems like they're smearing all Muslims...
The topic was whether Clinton should apologize for her unsubstantiated remarks in the debate:
The country needed to make sure the really discriminatory messages that Trump is sending around the world don’t fall on receptive ears. He is becoming ISIS’s best recruiter. They are going out people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.
The noun runway means:
A strip of hard ground along which aircraft take off and land.
[Oxford Online Dictionary]
I understand its meaning in the context, but what does it exactly mean? I tried to Google the idiom, but I found only one hit in Urban Dictionary whose definition doesn't seem to fit in the context (I don't want to put it here).
I wonder if there are any other (better) single words or idioms that can express the same meaning in the above quote. Any suggestion?
I can't find the origin of the idiom. I would like to know when and how the idiom started to mean what it means now. I can just speculate it could have started as a military term.