According to the conventional, Beltway wisdom, Bernie Sanders let Hillary Clinton off the hook when he declined to attack on the matter of her e-mails in the recent debate among Democratic contenders. Perhaps. But one wonders how many friends that would have made him among his party’s core voters and true believers. Better, perhaps, to go after her on a charge of apostasy as the senator from Vermont is doing when he says things like:
As he did in an interview on NBC’s Today show:
Clinton, meanwhile, seemed to be returning Sanders’ favor on the e-mails when she downplayed the VA scandal. Sanders was, for a time, chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs and might be expected to have known something about the criminal mismanagement at the VA. But as Bradford Richardson of The Hill reports, Clinton told Rachel Maddow that:
Clinton also:
“Now nobody would believe that from the coverage you see, and the constant berating of the VA that comes from the Republicans, in – in part in pursuit of this ideological agenda that they have …
They try to create a downward spiral, don’t fund it to the extent that it needs to be funded, because they want it to fail, so then we can argue for privatization.”
