After the Republican presidential contest reached a level that might leave first graders appalled, the Democratic battle, while still Socratic by comparison, saw its own slippage toward prolonged acrimony.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders had his best day of primary fight Saturday, trouncing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Alaska, Hawaii and the delegate rich Washington. The win helped Sanders cut Clinton’s daunting delegate lead.
It also gave the Vermont senator and his aggressive backers new fodder to argue against calls for him to quit the race, and even to declare he has a chance to win it.
“We are making significant inroads in Secretary Clinton’s lead and, with your support coming here in Wisconsin, we have a path towards victory,” Sanders said in a victory speech Saturday in Wisconsin.
“It is hard for anybody to deny that our campaign has the momentum,” Sanders said.
Sanders has won five out of the last six primary contests. He won those contests by big margins, and argues he can convince superdelegates to switch their support to him if he beats Clinton in late contests.
But the reality for Sanders is worse than it may have seemed Sunday in the glow of victories. The senator has shown he can win caucuses, even some in states with significant numbers of nonwhite voters. But Clinton retains a daunting delegate lead. She has dominated him in primaries. Polls show the former first lady prepared to trounce him in the crucial April 19 primary in New York, which she represented in the Senate. She has leads in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and California, the other delegate heavy states still to vote.
But Sanders’ surge leaves the candidate brushing off Demoratic calls for him to back off harsh attacks on Clinton.
“Clearly contrasting my position with Secretary Clinton’s is what a campaign is supposed to be about,” Sanders said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” as he hammered Clinton’s support for the invasion of Iraq, support for hydrolic fracturing and fundraising from powerful interests.
Sanders says he avoids personal attacks on Clinton, as opposed to policy contrasts, but critics see that distinction breaking down in his asserations that interests that fund her campaign are buying influence. The candidates also appear increasingly chippy with each other. Sanders on Sunday waved off a question about why he is not stopping his supporters from booing Clinton. “I don’t want our supporters to be booing her,” Sanders said on NBC. “But there are real differences of opinion.”
Sanders and Clinton have also failed to reach out to each other to offer personal congratulations after each won victories this month, Politico reported Sunday.
Sanders plans to stick around and continue attacking Clinton complicate her hopes of gliding to the nomination. But the Democratic fight still has nothing on the Republican battle, as the party faces a fractious convention fight in which some hope will devolve into literally armed camps.
GOP front-runner Donald Trump addressed international disgust at the state of the race and his comparison of his wife’s appearance to Cruz’s wife’s by offering up a defense familiar to sqaubbling siblings everywhere: he started it.
Trump did not imply or suggest that. He actually said, “He’s the one that started it.” He uttered those not traditionally presidential words in a bid to claim that an ad by nonaffiliated anti-Trump super PAC featuring a picture of his third wife Melania was an excuse for Trump’s attack on Heidi Cruz, including his posting an unflattering picture of Cruz’s wife alongside a flattering one of his own wife.
Trump and Cruz’s efforts to turn to substance this weekend involved an apparent competition to make more aggresively anti-Muslim statements after Friday’s deadly bombing in Brussels. Cruz stood by his widely-panned proposal to pre-emptively police Muslim neighborhoods in the United States in a bid to head off terrorism that the Americans who live there may not yet have even contemplated.
“What this looks like is proactive law enforcement,” Cruz said.
“We can’t become Europe,” he said, referring to the Muslim enclaves in Eureopean cites he fears could develop here.
His statements drew reubukes from President Obama, Clinton and the New York Police Department which scrapped the program on which he claimed he would base his plan. Even the unusually hawkish House Homeland Security Chairman Mike McCaul, a fellow Texan who said Sunday that Cruz seemed confused by the difference between Muslim communities in Europe and the United States.
“In Europe it’s very segregated, and you have the diasporas in Belgium that I saw,” McCaul said. “And they’re being radicalized because they’re not assimilated with the culture. I don’t think we have that same situation in the United States.”
“To send inflammatory messages could actually have an unintended consequence,” McCaul said.
Challenged by Cruz, Trump announced himself vindicated by the Brussels attack. He edged toward ascribing himself superpowers to fight terror. Trump claimed he “predicated” the Brussel’s bombing, though he seems to have forgotten to record his prophecy.
On Easter Sunday, a suicide bomber in Lahore, Pakistan, apparently targeted Christians celebrating in park, killing scores of woman and children and wounding hundreds more. While the White Hosue offered condoloences, Trump offered his services.
“I alone can solve,” he tweeted.
Minutes later, though, Trump seemed less confident about tackling intraparty politics in Louisiana than he did about solving Pakistani terrorism.
“Just to show you how unfair Republican primary politics can be, I won the State of Louisiana and get less delegates than Cruz-Lawsuit coming,” Trump tweeted.
The celebrity businessman was reacting to a Wall Street Journal report that Cruz may wind up with 10 more delegates from the state than Trump, despite Trump’s win in the state. While delegates won in a state are pledged to back the winner on the first ballot at the convention, Cruz has been working to assure many of the delegates freed to switch their vote on the second ballot will back him. The story said Trump’s campaign was unaware of his losses in Lousiana until the paper contacted him.
Trump’s threat drew derision from Democrats and Republicans alike, who asked how Trump’s confident claims about defeating the Islamic State square with his complaints about an “unfair” nominating process.
“Maybe your time is better spent reading rules than sending hate-tweets,” tweeted Cruz spokesman Ron Nerhing.
