Victors in Iowa, Sanders and Buttigieg are targets
MANCHESTER, N.H.» The two victors in the Iowa caucuses, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., came under sharp and sustained criticism in a Democratic presidential debate Friday, as the group of candidates assailed Sanders for his left-wing policy platform and pushed Buttigieg onto the defensive over his light experience in government.
In the opening stages of the most contentious debate so far, taking place four days before the New Hampshire primary, the runners-up in the Iowa contest charged at the winners in a bid to stop their momentum, focusing above all on the question of whether they could triumph in the general election.
Former Vice President Joe Biden warned that nominating Sanders would brand down-ballot Democratic candidates with the label of socialism, while asserting that
Buttigieg had shown no ability to mobilize black and Latino voters.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, another moderate, said Democrats could not defeat “the divider in chief” by nominating a divisive candidate of their own. And, in an even blunter exchange, she accused Buttigieg of presenting himself as a “cool newcomer” by dismissing the value of service in Washington.
Sanders and Buttigieg gave no ground to their critics, arguing determinedly for their distinctive theories of the 2020 campaign. Sanders insisted that Democrats would win if they campaigned on “an agenda that works for the working people of this country,” reigniting a familiar debate about the practicality of single-payer health care. And Buttigieg batted away skepticism about his relative inexperience.
“I freely admit that if you’re looking for the person with the most years of Washington establishment experience under their belt,” he said, “then you’ve got your candidate and of course it’s not me.”
The gibe drew forceful pushback from
Biden and Klobuchar, who quoted back to Buttigieg a dry line he delivered in Iowa, saying he found the impeachment proceedings “exhausting” and would have preferred to watch cartoons. She suggested Buttigieg was taking an unserious approach by playing to voters’ distaste for the federal government.
“It’s easy to go after Washington, because that’s a popular thing to do,” Klobuchar said. “It is much harder to lead and much harder to take those difficult positions.”
And Klobuchar drew a biting comparison between Buttigieg’s outsider message and that of the Democrats’ shared adversary: “We got a newcomer in the White House,” she said, “and look where it got us.”
The debate came at a moment of tumult and anxiety for Democrats, whose leadoff contest in Iowa on Monday turned into a fiasco of technical breakdowns, stalled and fumbled vote-counting and accusations of electoral illegitimacy from multiple presidential campaigns. On Friday afternoon, Buttigieg and Sanders both claimed victory in Iowa on different grounds.