NASHUA, New Hampshire — Hillary Clinton insisted on Wednesday that she hasn’t been influenced by the hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees she received from major financial institutions, her latest effort to blunt attacks from Sen. Bernie Sanders that she can’t be a progressive given the way she raises money from Wall Street.
In a town hall hosted by CNN, Clinton said she collected money for years in part because she wasn’t thinking about running for president, and that it’s normal for high-level cabinet officials to give speeches and accept fees. When asked why she accepted $675,000 in fees from a Wall Street bank, she explained, “that’s what they offered me,” and said that money won’t affect policy.
“Anybody who knows me who thinks they can influence me – name one thing they’ve influenced me on. Just name one thing,” she said. “I mean, they’re not giving me very much money now, I can tell you that much.”
Clinton remains under attack from Sanders, who has spent the last several days questioning how she can call herself a progressive at all. Sanders used the town hall to argue that Clinton was out of step with progressive values, and Clinton seemed to help him prove his point by noting her close connections to Wall Street and her relatively more militaristic foreign policy views.
“I do not know any progressive who has a super PAC and takes $15 million from Wall Street,” Sanders, who was the first candidate to speak, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “That’s just not progressive. As I mentioned earlier, the key foreign policy vote of modern American history was the war in Iraq. The progressive community was pretty united in saying, ‘Don’t listen to Bush. Don’t go to war.’ Secretary Clinton voted to go to war.”
Although Sanders did not talk much about his plan to reform Wall Street during the town hall, he has made breaking up the big banks and reinstituting Glass-Steagall a central part of his campaign.
Clinton also drifted from Sanders’ vision of progressive leadership when asked if she could promise not to expand military involvement during her time in office, something that Sanders has repeatedly vowed not to do.
“No, I can’t,” Clinton told a voter at the town hall. “I will do everything I possibly can to avoid sending American troops abroad and getting us involved in military conflicts, but I can’t in good conscience tell you that there would never be any circumstances in the time I served as president where it very well might be in America’s best, vital national security interest,” she said.
During Sanders’ portion of the town hall, he hit Clinton for her vote on the Iraq War during the Bush Administration, about which Clinton explained she was mislead by the administration and voted for it to give the U.S more leverage over the Iraqis. The Vermont senator did not vote for the war and remains against U.S military involvement in the Middle East.
Sanders’ surge of popularity over the course of the primary season has pushed Clinton to the left on numerous environmental and trade issues, but also called into question her less “progressive” attributes. On Tuesday in New Hampshire, Sanders claimed that Clinton acts like a progressive only “some days.”
Clinton angrily said that Sanders “has set himself” as the gatekeeper of who is progressive and who is not, and that “Barack Obama would not be a progressive … Joe Biden would not be a progressive” under Sanders’ definition.
Although she was expected to win the Iowa caucus by over three points, Clinton won by just 0.2 percent. In New Hampshire, Sanders already polls 16.5 points ahead of her.
“I have an uphill climb but I’m going to climb as hard as I can,” Clinton old New Hampshire voters.
She later added, “It’s very hard to see how any of [Sanders’] proposals could be achievable so I don’t want to over-promise, we’ve had to much of that I want to tell people what I’d do and I want to be specific.”
