The former president, who recently has been headlining his own Iowa events on Hillary Clinton’s behalf, took the Col Ballroom stage Friday evening to introduce her to an estimated 1,500 voters.
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Clinton has devoted significant time and money to Iowa, a state won by Barack Obama in 2008, and hopes her organizational strength there will best Sanders’ grassroots enthusiasm. Then the staffer bolts out the door.
“Let me say something that may not be great politics”, Sanders said, “but I think the secretary is right, and that is that the American people are sick and exhausted of hearing about your damn emails!” “Oh my goodness. Yeah, me too, me too”, she said as hands shot up around the room.
African-Americans will make up a solid majority of the electorate in the state’s February 27 primary.
The shunning of Bernie Sanders is underway.
Ted Cruz briefly challenged the front-runner for first place in Iowa, one of the race’s earliest primaries, Trump seems to have recovered a lead well outside the margin of error, according to most of the surveys released in the past week.
Sanders isn’t conceding. Across town, teams of his staffers are going door-to-door in predominantly black neighborhoods.
Clinton, who served as Obama’s secretary of state, and Sanders are locked in a tight race in the nation’s first caucus state, with polls showing Clinton’s once-formidable lead having evaporated.
This is Clinton’s firewall, and Sanders’ campaign is trying to break it down. And he gets specific about how a corrupt system benefits the very rich, and why it makes so many New Hampshire voters angry. It’s an issue that resonates among black voters following the April shooting of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man killed by a white police officer in North Charleston, and the June massacre of nine people by a white gunman at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.
“We just got back to school”, said Cady. Clinton’s critics – like Bill Curry – say the Affordable Care Act represents a give-away to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and no amount of tinkering with it can change that fact. “Their investments are to try to prevent me from being the Democratic nominee because they know I have the toughest, most effective, comprehensive plan to rein in Wall Street”, she said.
Of course, Hillary Clinton wants another debate – right before the New Hampshire primary.
Speaking to NBC News before the news broke, Clinton dismissed the potential impact of the simmering issue.
“The DNC has said it is not going to sanction any more debates until after February 9th”, said Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager. One young woman said she’ll definitely caucus on Monday night – for a Republican, Marco Rubio. “He has to figure out a way to set himself apart”. “I don’t thing that’s Bernie in general but more people who side with the further left liberal part of the spectrum”, he added. Almost two-thirds of respondents – Democrat and Republican – said they oppose her becoming president. “It’s in the churches”. But she has managed to hold on to her post long enough to help elect Hillary Clinton – no matter what Clinton’s record as a committed corporatist toady and a disastrous militarist (e.g., Iraq and the War on Libya) has been over the years. Few remember what F.A. Hayek explained in the last century-that “democratic” socialism is an oxymoron, because the state can not micromanage our economic affairs without ending freedom as we know it. Whether Sanders gains ground depends on whether more black South Carolinians take Bamberg’s approach.
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On Thursday he did the unthinkable, and followed through on a threat to skip the last debate before the Iowa caucuses-a risky gamble that paid off when his closest rival, Sen. Pete D’Alessandro, who is directing the Iowa operation for Sanders, said the staffing has grown from two people in May to over 100 today. “Boy, did we pay for that”, she said.
