Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders on Thursday renewed a pledge to detail how he would pay for his health-care plan prior to the Iowa caucuses, seeking to blunt one of several lines of attack coming from rival Hillary Clinton in recent days.
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Sanders’s underdog campaign said it is seeing a surge of contributions as a direct result of the new attention it is getting from the Democratic front-runner, with money coming in at a clip almost four times the average daily rate reported in the last quarter of 2015.
Sanders’ campaign responded aggressively Wednesday morning, tweeting a signed photo of Clinton working with the Vermont senator.
“[Polls] always tighten up as people begin to make up their minds, as they look at the candidates”, Clinton said in the interview.
“And what I’ve been saying on the campaign is that we had a brutal body blow with the great recession”, she said. In 2008, she decisively lost black voters to Obama, but in this cycle it is Sanders who is weak with non-whites, and who will therefore likely suffer as the campaign moves out of heavily-white Iowa and New Hampshire. “I feel really, really good about the campaign organization that I have”.
For his part, Sanders came as close to directly attacking Clinton as he ever has during this campaign in a newly released 30-second ad set to run in Iowa and New Hampshire.
The Clinton campaign this week has also gone after Sanders for his proposal to replace Obamacare with a single-payer health care system (some call it “Medicare for all”).
On Wednesday, the Sanders campaign also released its plans to pay for all its proposals except its health care plan. In New Hampshire a rural state in the northeastern USA where party primary elections are scheduled February 9 the latest Monmouth University poll showed Snders soaring to a 53 to 39 percent advantage over Clinton.
This week, the Clinton campaign changed its strategy to directly attack Sanders, for his positions on gun control and support of single payer health care. “And that’s because he doesn’t want to admit he would rely on a broad tax increase on the middle class to pay for it”, they added.
The editors noted that Clinton would shatter the glass ceiling and champion women’s rights in a way that no other president has if she were elected but argued the limits of her potential presidency are clear.
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“The thing that tells you as much as anything about [the Clinton campaign’s] current state of mind is Chelsea going on the attack”.
