Hillary Rodham Clinton’s forceful and confident performance in the first Democratic presidential debate may have heartened jittery Democrats who anxious that her mishandling of an email controversy demonstrates more fundamental problems with her political skills.
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Trump did salute Sanders after the Vermont Senator boldly stated that Americans didn’t want to hear about Clinton’s “damn emails” anymore.
Marco Rubio, who has seen his poll numbers rise since his performance in the last GOP presidential debate, told Fox & Friends on Wednesday morning that the debate “looked like something from the 80s”.
In addition to raising more than $1 million, the Sanders campaign said the two-and-a-half-hour-long debate helped direct unprecedented online attention toward the senator. She came away still feeling negative about Clinton and not feeling she knew much about the other four Democratic candidates. She said she thought the debate was much better than last month’s Republican debates.
Mo Elleithee, executive director of the Institute of Politics and Public Service at Georgetown University and former communications director for the Democratic National Committee.
Clinton and O’Malley pressed Sanders on his Senate votes against major gun control measures that most Democrats support.
“I believe that the signal that we sent to the region when the Iran nuclear deal was concluded was that we are accepting Iran’s greater position on this very important balance of power, among our greatest ally Israel, and the Sunnis represented by the Saudi regime, and Iran”, he said.
Sanders has built an insurgent campaign that draws huge crowds – almost always bigger than Clinton’s – and boasts far more individual donors than the former secretary of state.
“She’s dynamic, she’s working on her credentials, she’s not relying on her husband”, Gonser said. The other three candidates, Lincoln Chafee, Martin O’Malley and Jim Webb, danced around the frontrunners with selected jabs at their past policy decisions. Hillary said that as president, it’ll be her “job to rein in the excess of capitalism so it doesn’t run amok”.
There were a few fiery moments too, with Clinton accusing Sanders – her chief rival – of being soft on gun control. Sanders, he said, appears to be running to pull the party leftward. “We have work to do”, Clinton conceded during Tuesday night’s debate. While Clinton may not have come out a clear frontrunner, she fielded attacks from her opponents firmly and passionately, at the very least keeping her campaign afloat until the next hurdle.
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Clinton struggled at times during the debate to explain why her positions have seemed to shift with the electoral calendar. “Have you sent it privately – in more explicit terms – Have you been in touch with people close to the vice president or the vice president himself?” she asked.
