A boisterous New York crowed, booed and cheered as Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders engaged in several heated exchanges during Thursday night’s “Brooklyn debate.”
The moderators often struggled to get their questions out over the bickering candidates and feisty audience.
Sanders started to walk back his criticism that Clinton wasn’t qualified for the presidency but then hit her hard on her “judgment,” saying she voted for the “worst foreign policy blunder” in Iraq and supported disastrous trade deals.
Clinton hit back by saying that if her judgment was suspect, Sanders must not like Barack Obama’s judgment, since he appointed her secretary of state, or the judgment of New York voters who twice elected her to the Senate.
She then pointed to Sanders’ inability to explain how he would break up the banks — “his core issue!” she said — in an interview with the New York Daily News.
“I love Brooklyn,” she beamed when the crowd reacted loudly to one of her answers.
Sanders once again challenged Clinton to release the transcripts of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs. She said Sanders couldn’t point to a single example of Wall Street donations swaying her behavior in office and argued that President Obama signed Dodd-Frank’s financial regulations despite collecting vast donations.
CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer then pressed Sanders to release his tax returns. The two Democratic presidential began to shout over each other about who was more committed to a $15 minimum wage. “I think we need to be clear and not equivocate,” Sanders bellowed. “$15 an hour in all 50 states!”
Clinton tore into Sanders on gun control, accusing him of doing the bidding of the National Rifle Association. Before the debate, she claimed that the “highest per capita number” of guns used in New York crimes came from Sanders’ state of Vermont.
Challenged on her assertions about the impact of Vermont guns on crime in New York, she said she had a “lot of differences” with Sanders on the issue.
When Sanders chuckled at her answer, Clinton scolded him. “This is not a laughing matter,” she said loudly. “Ninety people on average are killed or commit suicide or die from accidents with guns [daily] — 33,000 people. I take it really seriously.”
“She didn’t answer the question, Wolf,” Sanders shot back. “That she thought that Vermont was responsible for a lot of the gun violence.”
The crowd appeared to turn against Sanders during the gun control exchange, since it is the issue where Clinton can most cleanly run to his left. But Sanders got loud applause when he hit her for using the phrase “superpredator” to describe violent criminals in 1996.
“It was a racist term,” he said calmly, “and everybody knew it was a racist term.”
Sanders is on his biggest winning streak of the primary campaign, winning seven straight states. The Vermont senator has pulled even with Clinton in national polls. Clinton has only won one of the last eight Democratic contests, sometimes taking less than 30 percent of the vote in the caucuses that hampered her failed campaign in 2008.
Yet at the same time, Clinton has a nearly insurmountable delegate lead. She has already begun running ads targeting Republican front-runner Donald Trump rather than Sanders. She mentioned Trump Thursday night when she lamented the lack of abortion questions in the Democratic debates, bringing up his comments about punishing women.
While such attacks have the effect of killing two birds with one stone — the former secretary of state is using Trump’s rhetoric to turn out minority voters, who have been the key to beating Sanders in most states — they also reflect a desire to pivot to the general election.
Truly declaring victory in the Democratic race and turning to November is impossible, however, as long as Sanders keeps winning. While Sanders was once reluctant to criticize Clinton, a decision members of his inner circle have publicly complained about, he is showing much less restraint now.
The septuagenarian socialist has been willing to hit Clinton on her vote for the Iraq War, paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and general ties to Wall Street as never before. He even suggested Clinton was unqualified to be president.
Bill Clinton’s recent heated exchange with Black Lives Matter activists was a reminder that the Clintons’ centrist legacy is still a liability with Democratic voters, including a larger and more diverse group of progressives than Sanders has not yet been able to mobilize. While Bill once triangulated between the Republicans and the left wing of his party, Hillary has been forced to triangulate between Sanders and Bill.
It once seemed these controversies would prevent Clinton and Sanders from ever debating again. The Clinton campaign once intimated that future debates would be contingent on Sanders’ “tone,” based on their belief that he can’t win the nomination so any criticisms only served to weaken her in the general election.
But with Sanders still winning states and raising vast amounts of money from enthusiastic small donors with little connection to the party establishment, he had little incentive to pull his punches, much less drop out of the race.
Debates have been a point of contention throughout this race, as the Democratic National Committee originally only sanctioned six of them. Sanders supporters argued that the schedule was designed to favor Clinton, and even some of the front-runners’ backers complained that the paucity of debates would cost them media attention compared to the Republicans, so more were eventually added.
Clinton hopes to end Sanders’ winning streak in New York, where he was born and she was a U.S. senator for eight years. She is heavily favored in the state because of strong minority support, although the race is closer among white Democrats.
That’s why the awkward joke about “colored people’s time” in a skit with Clinton and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, a progressive supporter of the former secretary of state, came at an inconvenient time. Nevertheless, Michigan is so far the only state where Clinton was expected to win but Sanders managed the upset.
While Clinton still leads among pledged delegates earned through her performance in the primaries and caucuses, superdelegates are the only reason she enjoys an overwhelming advantage over Sanders. That’s the nickname given to unpledged Democratic delegates who aren’t awarded through the primaries and get a vote at the convention because of their party leadership status.
These superdelegates are free agents who can vote for whomever they want. They favor Clinton by 469-31, compared to her smaller lead of 1,289-1,036 among the delegates she won through the popular voting process.
Clinton has also received over 2.4 million more votes in the primaries and caucuses than Sanders has, but the superdelegate disparity has fueled Sanders’ supporters perception that the nomination fight is rigged against them, much like the Vermont senator frequently complains about the “rigged economy.”
The Democratic race isn’t as contentious as the Republicans’ nomination fight — yet. Sanders’ team has floated the possibility of a contested convention for the Democrats too. And if Sanders voters feel cheated, it is possible Clinton will struggle to replicate President Obama’s strong young voter turnout this fall, and that some critics of her past support for free trade agreements will even entertain voting for a Republican like Trump.
“I am proud that millions of young people who previously were not involved in the political process are now coming to it,” Sanders said Thursday night. “We’ve got to open the door of the Democratic Party to those people and the future of the Democratic Party is not simply raising huge money from campaign contributors.”
Clinton countered that her coalition was even more diverse than Sanders’ and that she has won more votes than anyone else running in either party. “It’s going to be important that we unify the Democratic Party when the nomination process is completed,” she said, taking credit for helping Democrats come together and elect Obama president.
But there is a real divide among Democrats. Clinton is arguing that she is progressive but realistic, someone who can preserve the hard-fought liberal gains of the Obama years. Sanders counters that meaningful change is impossible without more directly taking on big money in politics. The fact that single-payer healthcare and free college exist in other countries suggests that his policies are realistic, Sanders argued.
The deterioration in Clinton and Sanders’ once-cordial relations were on full display Thursday night. There have been flashes before, such as Sanders’ angry response to Clinton surrogates questioning his qualifications and Clinton unloading on a Greenpeace activist who asked about her fossil fuel donations.
At the Brooklyn debate, however, the candidates were angry and sarcastic to each others’ faces as a crowd of Democrats whooped and hollered.
New York Democrats will render their verdict on Tuesday.
