Hillary Clinton has found her line of attack against the man who bested her in the New Hampshire primary.
Even before her landslide defeat in the first primary or her razor-thin margin in the Iowa caucus, Clinton was presenting Bernie Sanders as an unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky radical.
Sanders would promise the world, from free college to free healthcare. Clinton was a “progressive who gets things done,” someone merely trying to preserve the gains made under President Barack Obama while the Republicans try to reverse them.
The socialist senator from Vermont, in Clinton’s telling, would risk the president’s domestic legacy by opening up all the hard-fought battles of the last seven years — even Obamacare — for debate again.
And what, Clinton and her surrogates ask, has Bernie ever done anyway? Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., doesn’t remember seeing him at the civil rights marches of the 1960s. Clinton says journalists can’t find out who Sanders’ foreign-policy advisers are, if they’re not Henry Kissinger.
Clinton went after Sanders several times during Thursday night’s Democratic, even using a softball question about favorite leaders as an opportunity to bash Bernie supposedly criticizing the president as sharply as the Republicans do. (A “low blow,” Sanders replied.)
But Clinton’s closing argument against Sanders was simple. “I am not a single-issue candidate,” she said. “And I do not believe we live in a single-issue country.”
Clinton campaign chair John Podesta echoed this on Twitter. “Bottom line: Hillary isn’t a single-issue candidate,” he wrote.
This single-issue jibe can cover a multitude of sins. Don’t like Clinton’s Iraq war vote? That’s just a single issue. And besides, a 2002 war vote isn’t as important as a 2016 strategy for fighting ISIS.
Think Wall Street plays too big a role in American politics and Clinton has taken too much of their money? That’s a single issue. And you can find economists who like my financial reform plan better than Sanders’ anyway.
Concerned about the millionaires and billionaires? That’s just a single issues. There are millions and billions of other issues that are just as important.
Clinton has members of the Congressional Black Caucus talking about the impracticality of Sanders’ plans. Why not a free car and a free house next, asked a CBC board member?
With Democrats seemingly in an idealistic mood, this might not be the best line of attack. But Clinton is about to head into some states where the demographics are not dominated by starry-eyed white liberals. She’s hoping to bond with some voters for whom progressive policies are a more practical concern and also rack up some victories so she can get back to looking like the Democratic front-runner, if not the inevitable nominee.
That’s the plan anyway, to get back to winning and leave simple single-issue Sanders to his untenable promises. South Carolina and Nevada will test this theory.
