Seven years of control of the White House has built up fundamental divisions within about who the party should represent and what it should do.
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Early in the evening, Clinton struck at Sanders’s idealism, suggesting that his ideas were not realistic. “She changes so many opinions so fast”.
The first instance was when Clinton rebutted Sanders’ proposal for free collegiate education.
Clinton, in turn, accused her rival of quoting her selectively to diminish her progressive credentials.
With lopsided support among young people and independents, Sanders, a USA senator from neighboring state Vermont, garners 58 percent support from likely Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire, according to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll.
“I’m not going to make promises I can not 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”.
“You being the self-proclaimed gatekeeper for progressivism, I don’t know anyone else who fits that definition, but I know a lot of really hard-fighting progressives”, she said. “I just don’t want to stop bad things from happening”, she went on at a different point. And enough is enough.
As it happens, Maddow had referred specifically to one of two newspapers cited in the ad, and her choice might have allowed Sanders an out – the ad in question did not explicitly say the Telegraph had endorsed him. Standing on a stage at the University of New Hampshire, she looked at her opponent with visible disdain and dubbed that “an artful smear”.
I think it’s time to end the very artful smear that you and your campaign have been carrying out. She insists that he’s not the arbiter of such things and if he were, no one but he would measure up.
“I’ve seen way too many videos of Hillary changing her opinion”, she said.
Sanders, not surprisingly, suggested he has no interest in backing off his not-so-subtle contrasts.
That said, I also think the Clinton camp made a decision to shake things up, to push Sen.
CLINTON on Wall Street: “They are trying to beat me in this primary”. Her prospects are much stronger in primaries and caucuses after New Hampshire, as the race moves on to states with more diverse electorates that are to her advantage. It’s to say to American workers, ‘You are now competing against people in Vietnam who make 56 cents an hour minimum wage’. As a general matter, I think Democrats underestimate the structural challenges to winning the 2016 election with any candidate.
“Ohhhh, come on”, Sanders interjected.
“It’s really caused me to wonder who’s left in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party”.
Clinton: “Under (Sanders”) definition, President (Barack) Obama is not “progressive” because he took donations from Wall Street.
In contrast, Clinton, with her experience as Secretary of State, was keen to draw Sanders into the foreign policy weeds to show off how much better qualified she is to deal with the threat of ISIS and other pressing issues coming from outside the US.
To this, Clinton responded with more indignation. He’s not just taking on Clinton, he’s challenging the entire political establishment of which she is a key part. ‘I agree completely with Secretary Powell who said today, “This is an absurdity”.
The two Democrats kept up a markedly more contentious tone than when they last debated before the presidential voting in Iowa, and it signaled how the race for the nomination has tightened five days ahead of the first-in-the-nation primary in New Hampshire next Tuesday.
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In settings such as a forum on CNN on Wednesday and in the Democratic debates, Clinton seems comfortable, able to string together paragraphs of complex policy talk off the cuff.
