#DemDebate, Milwaukee: The top 5 takeaways
Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton at the PBS NewsHour debate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on Feb. 11. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
MILWAUKEE — Following a more than 20-point drubbing from Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire earlier this week, Hillary Clinton looked on Thursday night to use a nationally televised debate to reposition herself in the Democratic primary and make inroads with potential voters in Nevada and South Carolina, who will vote next.
In some ways, it’s an extraordinarily uphill battle. Sanders and Clinton have already cemented their political archetypes in this race against each other: The Democratic socialist senator from Vermont represents the idealistic wing of the party, and the former secretary of state, the pragmatic middle. Whether it was by intentional strategy or merely an inability to shift their core identities in the primary, the two politicians largely stuck to the same talking points they’ve used throughout the race. But Clinton seemed to redouble her focus on President Obama. For months, Clinton has claimed that she is the best protector of the Obama legacy, an experienced and adept lawmaker who can continue to make incremental changes on big policies, like health care.
Thursday night she made her Obama fight with Sanders a two-front war. Not only was she trying to send a signal to voters that she is the most capable Democrat in the Obama mold, but she also was attempting to paint Sanders as either unable or unwilling to safeguard the Obama legacy because he has, at times, been critical of the administration’s actions, like on extending massive tax breaks to the wealthy or cutting spending on domestic programs in deals with Republicans.
“We have a special obligation to make clear what we stand for, which is why I think we should not make promises we can’t keep, because that will further, I think, alienate Americans from understanding and believing we can together make some real changes in people’s lives,” Clinton said, near the top of the debate, an opening salvo that implied Sanders’ ideas are impossible to execute and might only serve to let down the base. At the same time, she sharpened her argument that Sanders is largely a one-note candidate protesting a government rigged in favor of the wealthy — a proposition she said she agrees with — and lacks the breadth of experience in both domestic and foreign affairs to be president.
Even so, throughout the evening, Clinton tried to shoehorn her political history into a more progressive version of itself, a recognition of Sanders’ inroads with the grassroots left and younger voters who likely cannot remember much of her husband’s administration.
For voters about to hit the polls this week and next, there were a few important takeaways from Thursday’s second one-on-one bout between Sanders and Clinton, and Yahoo News was on the scene to spot them.
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Hillary Clinton speaks during the Democratic presidential primary debate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on Feb. 11. (Photo: Morry Gash/AP)
1. Obama was the third Democrat onstage: Clinton moved swiftly to try to cast the debate between the two candidates as who liked Obama more: “You know, Senator, what I am concerned about, is not disagreement on issues, saying that this is what I would rather do … calling the president weak, calling him a disappointment, calling several times that he should have a primary opponent when he ran for re-election in 2012, you know, I think that goes further than saying we have our disagreements,” Clinton said.
Sanders shot back, “Well, one of us ran against Barack Obama. I was not that candidate,” sticking a pin, at least temporarily, in Clinton’s attempt to reduce the issue of which candidate supported the president more to a zero-sum proposition. While such a line of argument might woo some voters within the party, there is some risk for Clinton in aggressively tying herself to the president. Sanders has already tapped into frustration among the liberal base and independent voters that Obama was not progressive enough and did not fight hard enough for their issues.
2. “Vigorous agreement”: Perhaps one of the reasons it has so far been difficult for Sanders and Clinton, in particular, to truly differentiate themselves from each other and fellow Democrats is their persistent “vigorous agreement,” as Clinton put it on Thursday night. Despite Clinton’s attempt to position herself as the true Obama heir, the word “agree” was uttered nearly a dozen times throughout the course of the debate. Clinton said she “completely agree[d]” with Sanders on criminal justice reform and “vigorous[ly]” agreed with him on trying to fix income inequality. For his part, Sanders insisted he was almost always in agreement with Obama, though he defended his right to disagree with Obama when Clinton attacked him for being critical of the incumbent. The harmony in their positions could play to Sanders’ advantage, since he tends to speak in more sweeping generalizations, while Hillary gets more granular, opening herself up to more specific critiques.
3. Difference on immigration and the child migrant crisis: Sanders and Clinton’s exchange on these two related and important issues — given the upcoming caucuses in Nevada, a state with a 30 percent Hispanic population — was perhaps the most significant of the night. This was one of the few policy areas where they diverged starkly and with some detail. On the child migrant issue, Clinton has taken the Obama administration position that the children who are leaving dangerous communities in Central America to seek asylum in the United States should be sent back to their home countries as a message to parents to stop sending them. And she struggled to sound as empathetic as Sanders, who does not believe the children should be sent back, as she made her argument.
“I made it very clear that those children needed to be processed appropriately, but we also had to send a message to families and communities in Central America not to send their children on this dangerous journey in the hands of smugglers,” she said, after Sanders criticized her position on the issue.
On immigration reform overall, Sanders tried to explain to a national audience why he voted against a 2007 bipartisan immigration reform bill. It’s a disagreement that neatly encapsulates the divergence in approach between him and Clinton. Sanders voted against the bill because he believed the incremental change to the system was not enough to justify the legislation’s flaws, a complicated position to take with voters who are less familiar with legislative process. Clinton, on the other hand, argued that some change at that point would have been better than none at all in order to tout her vote on the measure (and, by extension, her overall view of politics).
Sen. Bernie Sanders makes a point during the Democratic presidential primary debate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on Feb. 11. (Photo: Morry Gash/AP)
4. Women’s rights and abortion still a secondary discussion in debates: Clinton spent much of her career in the Senate being a champion for women’s health and reproductive issues, and yet it’s not one of the positions she talks about often on the national stage. She has focused more on her national security bona fides from her time as secretary of state and other issue areas that she perceives as weaknesses for Sanders (e.g., gun safety). But Thursday night, Clinton finally brought up her strength on this issue, even if in a fleeting moment, in response to a question directed at Sanders about whether he would be “thwarting history” if his campaign stopped the first woman from being elected president. When Clinton name-checked Planned Parenthood and NARAL, the pro-choice advocacy group, Democratic women on social media erupted with similar “about time” messages.
“I was very proud to get the endorsement of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, because I’ve been a leader on these issues. I have gone time and time again to take on the vested interests who would keep women’s health care decisions the province of the government instead of women ourselves,” Clinton said. “I’m very proud that NARAL endorsed me because when it comes to it, we need a leader on women’s issues. Somebody who, yes, votes right but, much more than that, leads the efforts to protect the hard-fought gains that women have made, that, make no mistake about it, are under tremendous attack, not just by the Republican presidential candidates but by a whole national effort to try to set back women’s rights.”
When Yahoo News asked Clinton top aide John Podesta after the debate why this hasn’t come up more in these settings, Podesta suggested that the question came up because there were two female moderators onstage (though the abortion question was not actually asked; Clinton brought it up herself). He noted that she has been talking about those issues on the trail and that people know her record on women’s health matters.
5. A debate about Henry Kissinger? In a moment that might have seemed anachronistic for younger voters or for viewers who did not watch last week’s debate, Sanders and Clinton had an extended back-and-forth over Henry Kissinger and who is a “friend” of his and who is not. Last week, Clinton said she was “very flattered” to receive praise from the Nixon national security adviser and secretary of state, and this week, Sanders prepared to pounce, trying to attack Clinton broadly on her foreign policy worldview because he is not as adept as fighting her on the nuanced specifics. But the moment revealed a lot about how staged debates are and how campaigns work on these sorts of set pieces ahead of time. While Sanders uttered the attack line onstage — “I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend, and I will not take advice from him on foreign policy” — his campaign was ready to blast out a detailed, citation-filled press release on the 13 ways in which it believed Kissinger was awful, and then his aides hammered this point home in the spin-room post debate. Nothing about these affairs are spontaneous and everything happens for a reason, in this case, either the whim of the candidate who regretted not having a quip ready when Clinton name-dropped Kissinger last week or the fact that liberal websites did pounce immediately and the campaign knew it had an audience.
