Clinton looking confident
The Democratic nomination wasn’t decided in Milwaukee on Thursday night — that day of reckoning is still a ways off. But the contours of the campaign to come became clearer during the PBS NewsHour Debate on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus.
Here’s one thing that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would like you to remember:
Bernie Sanders is a dreamer whose ideas aren’t realistic and can never become law. On the other hand, she is a doer, pragmatic and competent. “I am not a single-issue candidate, and I do not believe we live in a single-issue country,” she said.
Here’s one thing Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont would like you to know:
Wall Street and the wealthy, along with a “rigged” economic system, are a big reason for the economic despair in parts of the country.
Sanders was Sanders — he looked like an unkempt older professor. Clinton was PBS-calm, patiently explaining again and again why Sanders is such an impractical idealist.
Sanders’ “Medicare for all” would blow up Obamacare, she claimed. “The last thing we need to do is throw our country into a contentious debate over health care,” she said. I have to agree.
Sanders’ plan for free college relies on state governors to want it to happen, and Clinton said she was skeptical that Republican governors such as Scott Walker would ever go for it. I’m more than skeptical — nor should he go for it.
As before, though, Sanders deftly raised the trust issue about Clinton.
Asked about campaign contributions and their influence on policy, Clinton answered that President Barack Obama’s campaign had taken millions of dollars from Wall Street and yet the president still championed legislation to check the power of big banks. Stop insinuating that I would kowtow to rich donors, she challenged Sanders. Sanders countered: “Let’s not insult the intelligence of the American people. Why in God’s name does Wall Street make huge campaign contributions? I guess for the fun of it — they just want to throw money around.”
In their sharpest exchange, Clinton claimed Sanders had been unfairly critical of President Barack Obama. The aim was to raise doubt about her opponent in the minds of black voters in South Carolina and other southern states. (Clinton received the endorsement Thursday of the Congressional Black Caucus). “The kind of criticism we’ve heard from Senator Sanders I expect from Republicans,” she said.
“Madam secretary, that was a low blow,” Sanders retorted. “One of us ran against Barack Obama. I was not that candidate.”
Sanders and Clinton emphasized issues that should resonate with voters in southern states, where the electorate is far less white than in Iowa and New Hampshire.
On criminal justice, a particular concern for African-Americans, Clinton recalled the shooting death of Dontre Hamilton at the hands of a Milwaukee police officer. “There is systemic racism in this state and in others in education and employment,” she said.
Said Sanders: “Turns out that the African-American community and the Latino community were hit particularly hard” by the Wall Street meltdown in 2008.
After losing to Sanders by 22 percentage points in the New Hampshire primary two nights ago, one might have expected a sharper edge from Clinton. I thought we might see Hillary the Fighter. Instead, we got Hillary the Methodical, calm and confident that time — and the arguments — are on her side. It’s a reasonable thing to think: The electoral map favors her. So does her campaign machinery. And so does the illogic of nominating a self-described “democratic socialist” in a year when the Donald Trump bug has bitten the Republicans.
The Democrats’ Bernie Sanders Fever may be breaking. Hillary Clinton is betting, at least, that it soon will.