If there had been any doubt about how Hillary Clinton would react to her heavy loss in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, she telegraphed the answer at last night’s PBS-hosted debate, in Milwaukee.
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US Democratic presidential rivals Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have faced off once again in the latest presidential debates, where they sparred over several issues including the lack of universal healthcare, racism and the influence of Wall Street donors on Washington.
“Madam Secretary, that is a low blow”, Sanders said.
Not any reference to the State Department Inspector General’s subpoena to the Clinton Foundation exploring possible connections between foreign government donations possibly trying to curry favor during Clinton’s four-year tenure as Obama’s secretary of State. But faced with a much stronger challenge from Sanders than her campaign expected, Clinton appears to have elevated Obama from the role of esteemed former and implicit endorser to that of a central-perhaps the central-figure in her campaign.
The candidates sparred on topics including immigration reform, jobs, racial equality and Wall Street. She feels strongly about Clinton and she even sent a token amount of money to the Sanders campaign in hopes of getting Clinton to move a little more to the left. The PAC has even set up a joint fundraising committee with super PAC Correct The Record, which actually does “coordinate” with Clinton’s campaign. Unlike Clinton, he said, I think “carefully about unintended consequences”. But she also repeatedly used her relationship with President Obama as both a human shield and an advertisement for herself.
“He pushed through and passed the Dodd-Frank regulation, the toughest regulations since the 1930s”, she said. He said he was the candidate willing to take on drug companies, the insurance industry and medical equipment suppliers who might be opposed to an overhaul. People felt that Obama was going to give a chance for their dreams to be realized. Clinton criticized Sanders for voting against a reform measure in 2007, which Sanders defended because of a provision in the bill for guest workers. The people will rise up against the big banks and corporations to take back America.
He has argued that the fact that Clinton accepts contributions from financial groups means she is less likely to take on Wall Street in office. “I guess just for the fun of it; they want to throw money around”, he added to applause.
Her most stinging moment came when she said, “Today, Sen”.
Asked by Clinton about who his foreign policy advisers were, Sanders shot back: “Well it ain’t Henry Kissinger”.
“I’ll tell you something that really galls me”. In the past, he’s called him weak. “He has called him a disappointment”.
“I understand we can disagree on the path forward. What are the real policy issues or legislation that he has presented?” said Dr. Hazel Dukes, president of the NAACP’s New York State Conference.
“And here in Wisconsin, I want to reiterate: We’ve got to stand up for unions and working people who have done it before, the American middle class, and who are being attacked by ideologues, by demagogues”.
But Clinton clearly had a lot of supporters in the room-the crowd cheered loudest for her. As she delivered it, her supporters in the room, of whom there were many, burst into loud cheers.
“I think it shows how desperate the Republicans are to prevent me from becoming the nominee”, Clinton said about American Crossroads’ efforts in an interview on ABC.
(CNN)In most debates, from intercollegiate to presidential, there are two types of debaters. Clinton in particular invoked the president often, praising Obamacare, his policing task force, and his advocacy for young men, for example (though Sanders also had a few instances in which he praised the president). Sanders said the problem wasn’t confined to race but investments in poor communities were “long overdue”. But that was not reflected in what Sanders wrote.
Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, looked more like the right brain of politics: emotional, visionary and unorthodox.
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“We planned on it from the start to make the New York Republican Party and New York Republicans, on a grassroots basis, decisive in the nomination of the next president of the United States”, said Ed Cox, the chairman of the state Republican Party. Some had already scheduled trips to help get out the vote in SC, an upcoming state on the Democratic calendar. In the next couple of weeks, we will see if her new strategy works.
