After the slimmest of victories in Iowa, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton cast Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders as an idealist who can never live up to his campaign vows and tried to undercut his argument that she’s the embodiment of a powerful Wall Street establishment.
The former secretary of state assailed Sanders’ platform throughout a two-hour debate on Thursday, depicting his pitch for free higher education as fatally flawed, his “Medicare for All” plan to expand health care as a threat to President Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement and his infrastructure plan as doomed to fail in a divided Congress.
“I’m not going to make promises I cannot keep,” Clinton said, adding: “I’m not going to tell people that I will raise your incomes and not your taxes — and not mean it. Because I don’t want to see the kind of struggle the middle class is going through exemplified by these promises that will raise taxes.”
Sanders, firing back, depicted himself as the conscience of a more liberal, progressive and frustrated Democratic Party long overshadowed by leaders such as Clinton who he said were too willing to compromise and too timid to fight for more ambitious gains.
“All of the ideas that I am talking about, they are not radical ideas,” Sanders said, invoking his proposal for a federal building spree that would create 13 million jobs and be funded by closing tax loopholes on Wall Street companies.
“The middle class bailed out Wall Street in their time of need,” Sanders added. “Now, it’s Wall Street’s turn to bail out the middle class.”
It was the fiercest clash yet for the two rivals, who shared the stage together for the first time without a third candidate after former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley bowed out of the race. And the two traded bruising barbs over policy divides that helped Sanders mount an unexpectedly strong challenge.
The sharpest came when Clinton accused Sanders’ campaign of a “very artful smear” by suggesting that she’s in Wall Street’s pocket by accepting donations from financial firms. The contention is at the heart of the insurgent challenge by Sanders, who at every turn reminds audiences he refuses to accept super PAC funds or court high-powered donors.
"Enough is enough. If you've got something to say, say it directly," Clinton said, her voice rising. "But you will not find that I ever changed a view or a vote because of any donation that I ever received."
Sanders quickly responded by raising the specter that her support of “weak” regulations may have driven the donations that fueled her campaign.
“Some people might think it had some influence,” he said, drawing a roar form the audience.
Experience vs. youthful following
It was a calculated performance by Clinton, who is trailing Sanders by double-digit margins in the New Hampshire polls and announced earlier Thursday that she would spend the weekend in Flint, Mich., to highlight the water crisis there.
She tailored her message with an eye to the voting to come over the next few weeks in Nevada and the South — and not to New Hampshire’s famously hard-to-impress independent voters, who go to the polls in the nation’s first primary Tuesday.
“I know exactly how to handle them because I’ve been in the arena time and time again,” she said of her critics, portraying herself as the experienced alternative to Sanders. “I am a progressive who gets things done. The root of that word is progress.”
An aggressive, sharp-edged Sanders was quicker to pummel Clinton after falling just short of victory in Monday’s Iowa caucus. With a friendly crowd at his back — the University of New Hampshire venue was festooned with signs for his campaign — he eagerly tried to paint his adversary as a weak-kneed accommodationist.
“What we need to do is to stand up to the big money interests and the campaign contributors,” he said. “When we do that, we can indeed transform America.”
He added: “Yes, Secretary Clinton does represent the establishment. I represent, I hope, ordinary Americans.”
The showdown came just three days after Clinton’s razor-thin victory in Iowa, which exposed weaknesses in her bid to become the nation’s first female president.
Droves of young first-time voters were driven to the caucuses by Sanders' platform, and some polls showed a roughly 70 percent gap between Sanders and Clinton among voters between the ages of 17 and 29. And the argument she made to her young skeptics is she's the proven, experienced politician ready for the foreign policy crises to come.
“I, personally, am thrilled at the numbers of young people coming out to your campaign,” she said, turning to her adversary. “They might not support me now. But I support them. And we will work together.”
Sanders’ pitch to reluctant Democrats, not surprisingly, was decidedly different.
”Democrats win when there’s a large voter turnout,” Sanders said, adding: “If you want to see Democrats do well across the board, our campaign is the one that creates the large voter turnout that helps us win.”
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