Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said Sunday that the candidates for her party’s presidential nomination should be careful with their words, a clear effort to push Sen. Bernie Sanders to tone down his attacks on Hillary Clinton.
“What I have cautioned over the last several weeks is that we need to make sure that the rhetoric that each candidate uses is such that it doesn’t make it more difficult for us to reunify,” Wasserman Schultz said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”
In recent weeks, on the campaign trail and in debates, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton and their teams have made increasingly sharp statements about each other and their fitness for the Democratic nomination.
A report in Politico last week quoted a Clinton aide after the New York primary saying, “We kicked his ass tonight. I hope this convinces Bernie to tone it down. If not, f—k him.”
Wasserman Schultz said on Fox that she anticipates more heat in the contest, but that it “pales in comparison” to the Republican side of the race.
“It’s expected in a campaign like this one, as we get towards the more narrow end of the funnel — we’ve only got 19 primaries left — that it’s going to get a little more intense,” she said. “But we need to make sure that we focus on the end game, which is to obviously make sure that we can elect our nominee for president of the United States, which I’m confident that we will.”
