Two days after a landslide defeat in New Hampshire, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sought to corner Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders on a debate stage on details for his expansive government programs, questioning how her opponent plans to pay for and accomplish single-payer health care and free college tuition.
“We should level with the American people to make sure they get affordable health care … every progressive economist that has analyzed this said the numbers don’t add up,” Clinton said. “We should not make promises we can’t keep that will further alienate Americans from believing that we can together make some real changes in peoples lives.”
“The last thing we need is to throw our country into a contentious debate about health care again,” she continued. “We are not England we are not Sweden.”
The two met for a debate in Milwaukee on Thursday night, and early on, the two clashed on health care, called for criminal-justice reform and pay equity for women.
With the race tenser and closer than either Democratic candidate had imagined, Thursday night’s debate was sharper, tenser and more combative than previous debates, and both candidates are expecting an increasingly acrimonious campaign.
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It is the second one-on-one debate between the two Democratic candidates for President. So far from the contests in New Hampshire and Iowa, Sanders has won more delegates than Clinton by a margin of 36 to 32.
Criminal-justice reform became a major issue early on in the debate, with Sanders and Clinton both calling for an overhaul. “We are sick and tired of seeing videos on television of unarmed people, often African American, being shot and killed by police,” Sanders said.
This truly was a PBS debate: genteel, civilized, lacking drama — and full of material that’s already aired somewhere else.
Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton spent most of Thursday night’s debate in what Clinton called “vigorous agreement” — disagreeing only about the methods they’d use to accomplish their common goals.
They both praised President Franklin D. Roosevelt. They both attacked Republican front-runner Donald Trump. They both promised to offer undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship, and to overhaul a criminal-justice system they believe treats blacks and Latinos unfairly.
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Clinton, who has struggled to regain momentum after losing badly to Sanders in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday, sought to cast herself as a more sensible, pragmatic progressive. She also cited her experience as secretary of state, implying that she had a broader array of expertise than Sanders, who focuses largely on economic inequality. “I am not a single-issue candidate, and I do not believe we live in a single-issue country,” Clinton said in her opening statement.
But, as the debate ended, Clinton had done little to establish how her goals were substantively different from those of her opponent. And Sanders responded repeatedly by turning an argument about practical politics into an argument about morality: Asked how he would make a single-payer health-care system work, Sanders pivoted to say that it had to work, because to do otherwise would be unworthy of America.
Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ latest ad stars civil rights activist Erica Garner, whose father was put in a police chokehold in 2014 and died.
Garner, who endorsed Sanders in January, argues in the ad released on YouTube Thursday that the independent Vermont senator is the Democratic contender most capable of reforming a racially biased criminal justice system.
“I believe Bernie Sanders is a protester," Garner says. "He’s not scared to go up against the criminal justice system. He’s not scared."
“And that’s why I’m for Bernie," Garner concludes in the nearly four-minute video titled "It's Not Over."
The ad, narrated entirely by Garner, gets its title from an anecdote Garner recounts sharing with her 6-year-old daughter Alyssa. Garner told Alyssa the story of Rosa Parks' refusal to get out of her seat at the front of the bus for a white person.
"'But those are in the old days, right Mommy?'" Garner recalls her daughter asking. "And I had to explain to her that it’s not really over."
The video continues with images of Garner caring for Alyssa and protesting the death of her father, Eric Garner, as she explains the pain of her father's loss and her efforts to change a system in which law enforcement has the power to take black lives frivolously.
Much of the debate lacked the bitterness of earlier forums as Clinton and Sanders laid out differences on policy questions. But the confrontation during the PBS "NewsHour" Democratic debate simulcast on CNN flared into open anger in the final moments.
Clinton accused her rival of not standing with Obama after he endorsed a book by CNN contributor Bill Press critical of the president. She said Sanders had called Obama "weak" and a "disappointment" in the past and she warned "the kind of criticism that we heard from Sen. Sanders about our president, I expect from Republicans. I do not expect (it) from someone running for the Democratic nomination to succeed President Obama."
Sanders was furious: "Madam Secretary, that is a low blow."
He insisted Obama was his friend, but that did not mean that a senator had to agree with the president on everything.
"One of us ran against President Obama," Sanders said, responding to Clinton's 2008 showdown against the then-Illinois senator. "I was not that candidate."
Fresh off a race-altering and historically large victory in New Hampshire, Bernie Sanders arrived at the Democratic debate on Thursday with all the momentum. He left with a bit more, but barely.
There was no clear winner on the PBS stage. There were no major gaffes, or clear-cut knockout blows. Both Sanders and Hillary Clinton had their moments, and their (minor) mistakes. But most of their exchanges centered on posture—Bernie the idealist; Hillary the pragmatist—not policy. Sanders seized every opportunity he could to deliver his secular sermon on income inequality. Clinton never missed a chance to tout her experience and policy knowledge.
All in all, it wasn’t the type of nuanced debate we’ve seen from these two in the past. When they weren’t talking past each other, as they did early in the debate on the subject of health care, they were talking in the same direction, as they did on the subject of systematic racism. Based on what happened in the past two contests—the tiniest of victories for Clinton in Iowa and a much larger one for the surprise underdog challenger Sanders in New Hampshire—a tie favors Sanders, who gets to continue to ride the narrative of the anti-establishment figure who is battling against one of the most powerful people in the Democratic Party and somehow holding his own. Based on what much of the chattering class sees when they look to the next two contests, meanwhile, a tie favors Clinton, who still holds key polling and structural advantages that will not change as long as the status quo remains. Still, if I had to call a winner based only on what I saw on stage and what matters for the current moment, I’d give it to Bernie by the wispiest of gray hairs.
In the days before New Hampshire's primaries, reporters encountered a curious phenomenon: Republicans or moderates who admitted a fondness for the Senate's only self-proclaimed democratic socialist. Plenty of them crossed party lines to vote for him in the Democratic primary -- and 2,095 took Republican ballots and wrote in the name of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt).
The write-in totals for the primary, released by New Hampshire's secretary of state Thursday, find that well more than half of Republican write-in votes were cast for Sanders, and 540 more were cast for former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. No other candidate, or "candidate" came close; Kanye West, the rapper and producer who has threatened to run for president in 2020, earned just one write-in vote. None of this surprised the Sanders campaign.
"He gets a significant Republican vote in Vermont, about 20 percent in the last Senate election," said spokesman Michael Briggs. "There was a Castleton University poll last year in Vermont that showed him tied for the lead among Republican White House hopefuls."
Sanders's total was dominant, but not historic. Four years earlier, 2,289 New Hampshire Democrats who turned out for the uncompetitive re-nomination of President Obama wrote in the name of Texas Congressman Ron Paul, a libertarian whose coalition included plenty of liberals. A much smaller number wrote in Hillary Clinton, then serving in the Obama administration.
Harry Belafonte has endorsed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for president, NBC News has learned.
The singer and songwriter who was active in the Civil Rights Movement and close with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. released a video Thursday detailing his endorsement that was given exclusively to NBC News.
"I would suggest to those of you who have not yet made up your minds, or maybe even some of you who have made up your minds, to maybe consider and reconsider what it is that Bernie Sanders offers," Belafonte said in a video endorsing Sanders. "He offers us a chance to declare unequivocally that there is a group of citizens who have a deep caring for where are nation goes and what it does in the process of going."
Belafonte met with Sanders in New York on Wednesday, the day after he overwhelmingly beat challenger Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary.
As the race moves to South Carolina, where 55 percent of Democratic voters in 2008 - the last major primary contest for Democrats - are African American, both Clinton and Sanders have been working to shore up as much black support as possible.
At Thursday's first Democratic debate after the New Hampshire primary, Bernie Sanders lambasted rival Hillary Clinton for her friendship with Henry Kissinger, calling the man "one of the most destructive secretaries of state of the modern history of this country.
"In her book and in this last debate, [Clinton] talked about getting the approval or the support or the mentoring of Henry Kissinger," Sanders said on stage. "I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger."
Sanders blamed Kissinger, who served under Republican President Richard Nixon, for destabilizing the political situation in Southeast Asian countries and paving the way for the Khmer Rouge's mass killing of 3 million people in Cambodia.
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Clinton, who during the last Democratic primary debate boasted of Kissinger complimenting her time as secretary, shot back: "Well, I know journalists have asked who you do listen to on foreign policy, and we have yet to know who that is."
"Well it ain't Henry Kissinger," Sanders interjected.
"That's fine," Clinton said, going on to defend Kissinger's policies with China as a net positive for the U.S. "You know, I listen to a wide variety of voices that have expertise in various areas. I think it is fair to say whatever the complaints you want to make about him are, that with respect to China -- one of the most challenging relationships we have -- his opening up China and his ongoing relationships with the leaders of China is an incredibly useful relationship."
There is very little doubt that Bernie Sanders will scale Hillary Clinton’s “firewall” of minority voters by making some inroads into her support among them. The only question is how high he’ll get, and for a sense of how he’s doing on that score, one key thing to watch will be how Sanders performs among young nonwhite voters.
With the Nevada caucuses and the South Carolina primary looming, the Clinton and Sanders campaign are settling in for a long, brutal battle for nonwhite voters, and the Clinton camp is eying these contests and a string of primaries across the south as a firewall of sorts. The Post account of the state of play contains this important nugget, noting that the Sanders campaign claims its internal polling shows young nonwhite voters moving towards him:
Jeff Weaver, Sanders’s campaign manager, said that internal polling is starting to show movement in Sanders’s direction among younger voters of all backgrounds in upcoming states.
“Younger voters are clearly the strongest group for Senator Sanders, and this is sort of reminiscent of the Obama campaign — where younger voters were the president’s strongest bloc as well — across racial lines,” Weaver said.
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The Democratic state chair in South Carolina, Jaime Harrison, tells NPR that Sanders’s ability to increase his support among black voters in the state may hinge in part on whether he can do what Barack Obama did in 2008: Get young African Americans on his side, and get them to persuade their older relatives to do the same. That’s because black women who are a bit older — say, 35-60 — may be pivotal to the outcome, and Sanders might be able to reach them through younger voters, Harrison says: “Sanders has to figure out how do you communicate and talk to those folks.”
The Sanders campaign's counterargument is that so far he's lagged Clinton in the number of national Democrats who view him favorably largely because as of the end of 2015, a good 30 percent of Democrats didn't know who he is. Playing to a draw in Iowa and winning decisively in New Hampshire fixes that problem. Everyone who's remotely engaged in the political process is going to hear about Bernie Sanders, and the question is whether black and Latino voters will start feeling the Bern when they do.
It's not guaranteed to happen by any means. But the Clinton campaign's assurances that it won't happen aren't substantiated by anything in particular. The longer the candidates argued in Iowa and New Hampshire, the more people tilted toward Sanders. The exact same thing could easily happen in Nevada, South Carolina, and elsewhere unless Clinton actually improves or sharpens her arguments.
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The bullish case for Sanders starts with the fact that Latinos and African Americans are not exactly legendary for their aversion to left-wing political views. Indeed, if you look at the two most prominent members of Congress who've endorsed Sanders — Reps. Raúl Grijalva and Keith Ellison — you'll see that one is Latino and the other is black. And that's no coincidence. They are the co-chairs of the House Progressive Caucus, a group that Sanders co-founded years ago and that is composed disproportionately of minority members.
Not every black (or especially Latino) member of Congress is in the CPC, but the minority members do have a distinct tendency to cluster in the leftward half of the caucus. When black members, in particular, meet as a group to produce the annual Congressional Black Caucus budget, it tends to feature Sanders-esque ideas like a financial transactions tax and a direct job-creation plan targeting minority youth.
None of that proves that minority politicians will endorse Sanders (few have so far) or that minority voters will flock to him. But it makes the point that in general, black and Latino Democrats seem comfortable voting for left-wing politicians offering Sanders-esque platforms. Ta-Nehisi Coates says he's voting for Sanders while Michelle Alexander made a vehement case against Clinton, giving credence to the notion that as minority voters learn more about the Vermont senator they will learn that he is closer ideologically than Clinton is to the kinds of politicians they vote for when they have a chance.
On CNN last week and on Meet the Press this week, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders cited me as someone who has given him foreign policy advice. I admit I was surprised to hear this—I have spoken to Senator Sanders only once since he declared his candidacy, in October. In the time since, this fact has been used by the media and his opponents to cast doubt on Sanders’ foreign policy credibility, to point out a supposed weak spot in a surging candidacy: Since I’m not on his campaign, and have met with him only once, how serious could Sanders—the socialist crusader battling the former secretary of state—really be?
The answer is: serious. Since Sanders’ public mention of me, I have been asked repeatedly whether I think his foreign policy positions and experience are sound. I do.
In my dealings with him, and in analyzing his record in Congress over the past 25 years, I have found that Sanders has taken balanced, realistic positions on many of the most critical foreign policy issues facing the country. In the mold of realists like Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush, Sanders voted against the invasion of Iraq in 2002, while wisely supporting the war against in Afghanistan in 2001 and the intervention in the Balkans in 1990s. And Sanders certainly isn’t a foreign policy lightweight: In fact, given his long tenure in the House and Senate, he has more foreign policy experience than Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama did when they were running for office the first time.
What would a President Sanders’ foreign policy look like? Based on his record and my conversation with him, I believe it would be rooted in a number of key principles. First is restraint in using American force abroad. As he has stated, and as is demonstrated by his vote against the Iraq War and the first Gulf War, Sanders believes military action should be the last, not first, option and that, when taken, such action should be multilateral. I also believe, based on our conversation, that he would follow the Weinberger Doctrine (also known as the Powell Doctrine): When the United States uses military force abroad, our objectives should be clear, we should be prepared to use all the force necessary to achieve those objectives, and we should know when they have been achieved.
Sanders has demonstrated these principles in Congress. Before the 2016 campaign, I briefed him once, in 2006, when we discussed a foreign policy paper I had coauthored about how the United States could begin a strategic, phased withdrawal from Iraq. Unlike many of his Democratic colleagues, who characterized our plan as cut-and-run, Sanders supported it. He recognized that Iraq was not the most critical front in the war against terror; that America’s involvement there was creating more terrorists in the region and around the globe than we were capturing or killing; and that the Iraq War was diverting attention and resources from the necessary war in Afghanistan.
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