Clinton jabs leave mark on Sanders
It went like this, over and over again: Bernie Sanders: Here’s a problem I wantto fix and how I’d fix it. Hillary Clinton: Here’s why your plan wouldn’t fix that problem, why it can never work.
Sanders: Here’ s why the problem I just described is still a problem.
Clinton had pragmatic policy proposals and criticisms, delivered with poise but punch, of her upstart opponent’ s extraordinarily ambitious promises. The numbers don’ t addup; they are total nonstarters in Congress; governor son whom them depend would never buy in.
Sanders returned to the same old mantras about millionaires and billionaires and the beleaguered American worker. Nobody doubts his earnestness. What they doubt is his ability to get things done.
To answer just about every question, even ones on race, he returned to his stock phrases on inequality, how Wall Street and the pharmaceutical industry are laughing to the bank as the rest of us suffer.
To be fair, his two or three notes are good ones, played with passion and precision. But you can’t combine the same notes ad nauseam. You get a John Cage symphony.
Andin addition to repeating himself, he laid out more sky-high (actually, passing Mars orbit) plans: “At theend of my firstterm, we will not have more people in jail than any other country.”
Hmm. We have a half-million more jailed people than secondplace China. How does that prison-clearing process work, exactly?
It also helped that Clinton came, for the first time in a long time, with a calm and confident tone.
The only time either candidate lost it was when Hillary, obviously seeking to activate black voters, essentially called Sanders a traitor to PresidentObama.In high dudgeon, turning red, he said of course senators can disagree with Presidents they generally support. Hillary replied that Sandershad more fundamentally sought to under cut the President, including encouraging a primary challenge in 2012. Cheapshot? No, fair game. Hewas aspirational, she was rational. And sooner or later, even in an angry year, people are going to remember that politics is the art of the possible.