By Brendan Bordelon
Monday, January 18, 2016
On Sunday night in Charleston, for the first time this
cycle, the Democratic presidential debate bore at least a slim resemblance to
its raucous Republican counterpart. Reeling from an unexpected decline in Iowa
and New Hampshire just two weeks from the first caucus, Hillary Clinton finally
threw herself into a series of scripted attacks on Bernie Sanders’s gun-control
and health-care plans while wrapping herself tightly in President Obama’s
mantle.
But Sanders hit back harder, painting Clinton as an
establishment figure beholden to Wall Street and even engaging in some Trumpian
braggadocio over his climbing poll numbers. “As Secretary Clinton well knows,
when this campaign began she was 50 points ahead of me,” he said. “Guess what?
In Iowa, New Hampshire, the race is very, very close. Maybe we’re ahead in New
Hampshire. . . . We have the momentum, we’re on the path to victory.”
It was a clear shift from the placid, deferential debates
of last year. But despite several spirited tussles during which the candidates
interrupted and talked over each other, neither seemed to get an obvious edge.
In a race where the underdog is surging and the specter of the 2008 Democratic
primary looms, Clinton’s failure to land a decisive blow is a missed
opportunity. It’s still her race to lose, but on Sunday night, she did little
to blunt Sanders’s momentum — or even make up the ground she’s already lost.
Clinton’s attacks on Sanders echoed the onslaught her
scrambling campaign deployed against the Vermont senator over the last week.
Faced with a sudden, sharp drop in the polls in the first half of January, a
drop that left Clinton neck-and-neck with Sanders in Iowa and trailing him in
New Hampshire, her campaign launched a multi-pronged offensive against his
gun-control stance, his plans for health-care reform, and his rhetoric on Wall
Street. Clinton called Sanders “a pretty reliable vote for the gun lobby” on
Wednesday, the same day her campaign held a conference call slamming Sanders
for refusing to detail how he’d fund his “Medicare for all” proposal, and the
day after her daughter Chelsea claimed that Sanders wanted to “dismantle Obamacare.”
On Thursday, her campaign went after Sanders when he aired an ad describing
“two Democratic visions” for Wall Street regulation — an allusion they felt
constituted an unscrupulous “attack ad.”
Some of the criticisms seemed to sting the Sanders campaign.
On Saturday, Sanders appeared to reverse his position on a bill that would hold
gun manufacturers accountable for crimes committed through their products. And
just hours before the debate, he released a plan to fund his health-care
proposal through tax increases.
Inexplicably, however, Clinton failed to make hay over
Sanders’s flip-flops, saying only that she was “pleased to hear that Senator
Sanders has reversed his position.” And when she did go after Sanders on
Sunday, he struck back forcefully.
“Secretary Clinton knows what she says is very
disingenuous,” he said in response to her claim that he votes with the NRA. He
called her allegation that he plans to dismantle Obamacare “nonsense — no one
is tearing this up, we are going to go forward.” When Clinton attacked him for
raising taxes on the middle class to fund his health-care plan, Sanders said he
was “disappointed that Secretary Clinton’s campaign has made this criticism,
it’s a Republican criticism.”
Perhaps Clinton’s strongest sign of life came in response
to Sanders’s attack on her ties to Wall Street, when she combined her
relentless praise of President Obama’s legacy with an attack on Sanders’s
character. “The comments that Senator Sanders has made don’t just affect me, I
can take that,” she said. “But he’s criticized President Obama for taking
donations from Wall Street, and President Obama has led our country out of the
great recession. Senator Sanders called him weak, disappointing!” She ended by
pledging to “defend President Obama,” to wild cheers from the crowd.
But it’s not clear that tying her mast to Obama’s will be
enough to get her through the Democratic primary. “We always knew this race
would get tight,” Clinton campaign manager John Podesta wrote in a fundraising
e-mail the day before the debate. It’s a line the Clinton camp — and Clinton
herself — has used to fend off reporters and soothe anxious supporters since
the race tightened earlier this month.
Privately, however, close Clinton advisers are kicking
themselves for their complacency in the face of Sanders’s insurgent campaign.
Though she took soft swipes at Sanders’s gun-control stance over several
Democratic debates last year, for the most part Clinton and her campaign used a
soft touch against her rival until last week. As the New York Times reported Saturday, nearly a dozen of Clinton’s
friends, outside allies, and donors now believe they underestimated Sanders,
allowing his progressive, anti-establishment message to develop into a
juggernaut.
Compounding the anxiety are the similarities to Clinton’s
last foray into Iowa. Having entered the race with a comfortable lead, she saw
her prospects evaporate under competition from a senator with limited national
experience and a transformative, ultra-liberal message. An unexpected wave of
young and new voters pushed Obama to victory in Iowa in 2008 — a phenomenon
Clinton and her advisers worry is repeating this cycle, as Sanders continues to
draw record crowds of college kids to rallies nationwide.
The Clinton campaign hopes that the phenomenon stops
there and that Sanders fails to connect with the African-American and Latino
voters he needs if he is to compete in South Carolina, Nevada, and other states
where his polling is lackluster. But like Obama in 2008, Sanders plans to
broaden his appeal in the wake of a win in Iowa or New Hampshire. “When the
African-American community becomes familiar with my congressional record and
with our agenda, and with our views on the economy, and criminal justice — just
as the general population has become more supportive so will the
African-American community, so will the Latino community,” Sanders promised.
With no more debates until after Iowa and New Hampshire,
Sunday night was Clinton’s last chance to directly undermine Sanders’s surge.
Unless she really wants to test whether a Sanders win in the early states will
translate to a second look elsewhere, she and her campaign will only get more
aggressive from here forward.
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