Rivals take shots at leader in

Bernie Sanders is making the rest of the Democratic presidential candidates see red.

The Vermont senator came under heavy fire during Tuesday night’s Democratic debate, with the remaining candidates shredding his left-wing agenda as counterproductive to their mission of defeating President Trump.

As the undisputed frontrunner of the race, Sanders was the main target on stage in Charleston, S.C., even facing scrutiny from fellow progressive Elizabeth Warren over some technicalities about his signature “Medicare for All” plan.

But it was the moderates who went after Sanders in more blunt terms, as they scrambled to slow down his momentum ahead of Saturday’s South Carolina primary and the critical Super Tuesday elections on March 3.

Mike Bloomberg, who faced a brutal rhetorical beating in last week’s debate in Nevada, took an early shot over recent revelations that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election to help reelect Trump by also boosting Sanders’ campaign.

“Vladimir Putin thinks that Donald Trump should be president of the United States, and that’s why Russia is helping you get elected,” Michael Bloomberg fired at Sanders, prompting roars from the crowd.

Sanders shook his head in response and shifted gears by saying that, if elected president, Putin would not be interfering in “any more American elections.”

But Bloomberg and the other moderates were only getting started.

In a scrappy debate that featured plenty of interruptions and hand-waving, the centrists dredged up Sanders’ recent controversial praise for a literacy program enacted by Fidel Castro, the late Cuban dictator.

“I am not looking forward to a scenario where it comes down to Donald Trump with his nostalgia for the social order of the ’50s and Bernie Sanders with a nostalgia for the revolution politics of the ’60s,” said Pete Buttigieg.

Sanders countered he was echoing former President Barack Obama’s policy of ac