Hillary Clinton debuted a more pointed message Thursday aimed at winning over minorities, as she bet her campaign for the presidency on her ability to entice black and Latino voters to support her over Bernie Sanders.
In a debate held just two days after the Vermont senator trounced Clinton in the New Hampshire primary, she called for vast changes to the criminal justice system, railed against “systemic racism” and warned that Sanders’ plan to expand health care would risk the first black president’s signature policy achievement.
Sanders sharpened his tone as well, adding a vow to drastically reduce incarceration rates in his first term to his call for a political “revolution.” He invoked the “beyond unspeakable” incarceration rates of black men and said race relations would be better under him than any other White House contender.
And, grappling with perhaps his biggest weakness, Sanders opened a new front in the campaign by questioning Clinton’s foreign policy acumen because she sought advice from former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
“I happen to believe that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state,” Sanders said, mentioning the secret air raids the U.S. launched in Cambodia during the Vietnam War.
Clinton retooled after her 22-point loss in New Hampshire unearthed weaknesses in a campaign once thought to be on an inevitable march to the nomination. In both Iowa and New Hampshire, she was abandoned by an overwhelming majority of young voters.
The former secretary of state hopes to bounce back in contests this month in Nevada and South Carolina, where her advisers believe a largely minority Democratic electorate will flock to her camp. She is also stepping up her pitch to women who want to elect the nation’s first female president.
She cast herself as the defender of “the hard-fought gains that women have made, that make no mistake about it, are under tremendous attack. Not just by the Republican presidential candidates but by a whole national effort to try to set back women’s rights.”
Sanders, too, said an election victory for him would make history. He would become the first Jewish president and would be the first candidate who defines himself as a democratic socialist to ascend to the Oval Office.
“Somebody with my background, somebody with my views, somebody with a history of taking on establishment views, a Sanders victory would be of some accomplishment as well,” he said.
For two hours, the two sparred in Milwaukee in a debate that took on the same edginess as last week’s showdown in New Hampshire, with Clinton assailing Sanders’ policies as doomed-too-fail in a divided Congress while he painted her as a tool of the Wall Street elite.
Clinton warned that Sanders should “level with people” about his health care plan, which she said would risk coverage for millions of people benefiting from President Barack Obama’s policy.
“The numbers don’t add up and many people will actually be worse off than they are now,” she said of Sanders’ Medicare for All proposal, adding: “The last thing we need is to throw our country into another contentious debate on health care.”
She also targeted his free tuition plan for all public universities, which Sanders said should be a “right of all Americans” much like K-12 education is now. Clinton again questioned whether his plan is fiscally realistic, and said that his entire package of proposals would expand the federal government by 40 percent.
Their clash was most intense, however, in the closing minutes of the debate when Clinton accused her adversary of impugning Obama’s record.
“The kind of criticism I hear from Senator Sanders I expect from Republicans,” she said. “I do not expect it from someone seeking the Democratic nomination.”
Calling it a "low blow," Sanders reminded Clinton of the 2008 contest: "One of us ran against Barack Obama. I was not that candidate."
Sanders invoked the same themes that propelled him to victory in New Hampshire and a razor-thin loss in Iowa, including tax increases on the wealthiest Americans to fund a surge of new infrastructure programs and an expansion of Social Security benefits. His battle against Wall Street, he said, would boost struggling minority communities.
“As I understand it, the African-American community lost half of their wealth as a result of the Wall Street collapse,” Sanders said, adding: “Clearly we are looking at institutional racism.”
It was a common thread for both candidates, who seized on the police shootings of unarmed black men that ignited protests around the country and debates in the nation’s statehouses.
Clinton tried to reinforce her message that she’s the keeper of Obama’s flame by casting herself as the candidate who can best extend his legacy.
“We are seeing the dark side of the remaining systemic racism that we have to root out in our society. I think President Obama has set a great example,” she said. “Now, what we have to do is to build on an honest conversation about where we go next.”
Sanders promised by the end of his first term in the White House that the U.S. “will not have more people in prison than any other country.” And he said he would end “over-policing” in black neighborhoods that has led to disproportionately higher incarceration rates and more violence.
“I would hope that we could all agree that we are sick and tired of videos on television of unarmed people being shot by police officers,” he said. “We have to make it clear that any police officer who breaks the law will in fact be held accountable.”
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