Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton moved past the rancor over a breach of her campaign’s valuable voter data, shifting Saturday night’s debate into a pointed but polite discussion of national security, Americans’ heightened terrorism fears and the economy.
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The wide-ranging debate was held at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, and hosted by ABC News.
While Sanders’ campaign earlier said that the breach was the work of a low level staff member, it later emerged that the campaign’s national data director, Josh Uretsky, was involved along with at least three other aides in exploiting the temporary loophole.
“This is not the kind of campaign that we run”, he said.
“As soon as we learned that they looked at that information, we fired that person”, Sanders said.
Sanders is knowledgeable in many areas, but the reason he’s not in sync with his party isn’t so much specific differences on policies as it is that he seems to be saying that other concerns – ISIS, race, immigration and so on-aren’t “real issues”.
The Sanders campaign was not eager to harp on it, but did not come rushing to Clinton’s defense either.
Clinton said Trump was becoming the Islamic State group’s “best recruiter” with his call to temporarily bar Muslims from entering the United States.
“Mr. Trump has a great capacity to use bluster and bigotry to inflame people and to make them think there are easy answers to very complex questions”, she said.
The debate got a little heated when O’Malley claimed that both Clinton and Sanders are not doing enough to curb gun violence. Still, Clinton saved her hardest punch for Trump, the sole GOP candidate mentioned during the debate. “Not only do I apologize to Secretary Clinton… I mean, she made it up; it was a sound bite”.
The third debate settled it. If you want to be the Democratic nominee, you better support making college affordable. The former top diplomat accepted the apology.
Americans should be focused on detecting and reporting suspicious behavior and making sure that ‘Muslim Americans don’t feel left out or marginalized at the very moment when we need their help’.
“I am not giving up on Libya and no one should”, Clinton said. But he said troops on the ground must be Muslims, and not American troops.
“They should be Muslim troops”, he said. When he suggested Clinton couldn’t separate herself from Wall Street, she said he was hypocritical and had “no trouble” raising money from major corporations when he led the Democratic Governors Association.
Over protests from Clinton and Sanders, O’Malley painted himself as the only candidate to consistently stand strong on the issue of gun control.
“ISIL videos, ISIL training videos are telling lone wolves the easiest way to buy a combat assault weapon in America is at a gun show”, said O’Malley, who accused his rivals of “flip-flopping” on the issue. And at 52, O’Malley is a generation younger than Clinton and Sanders – something of which he reminded viewers.
“Sanders and Clinton were quick to respond, with the senator from Vermont quickly speaking up”.
“Let’s calm down a little bit, Martin”, Sanders said. But even if general-election debates aren’t that important, it’s safe to say she’ll do her homework.
In the debate’s final minutes, Clinton sneaked in a reference to the movie “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”, the latest installment of the sci-fi series that opened Friday nationwide.
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“Yeah, let’s tell the truth”, Clinton chimed in.
