The final face-to-face meeting between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders before the nation’s first presidential primary is all about finding a breakout moment.
The debate, 9 p.m. ET Thursday night, comes after Clinton scored a gossamer-thin victory in the Iowa caucuses. But a win is a win, and she wants it to stay that way through the New Hampshire contest Tuesday and beyond.
Sanders, though, is the heavy favorite on his home turf in New England and not willing to let the former secretary of state chalk up a victory in New Hampshire as she did in 2008.
And without former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley in the race — he withdrew earlier in the week — look for Clinton and Sanders to intensify their focus and sharpen their rhetoric.
Things to watch at the University of New Hampshire, which will be on MSNBC:
WHO’S A REAL PROGRESSIVE?
Watch for Clinton and Sanders to take off running on this topic, which intensified over Twitter and in live appearances after Monday’s Iowa caucuses. The reason: Theirs is a fight for the Democratic Party’s core liberal voters.
Clinton claims she’s a “progressive who wants to make progress,” a dig at what she suggests are Sanders’ pie-in-the-sky ideas.
Sanders, a socialist, scoffs at that as the height of hypocrisy. Most progressives he knows, he tweeted, did not support the Iraq war, while Clinton voted for it as a senator. And he’s lately been going after her for supporting President Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. Earlier this week, he said she’s perhaps progressive on “some days.”
Clinton shot back from the campaign stage that the charge was a “low blow,” saying she’s been “fighting the progressive fight” for years, including her drive to expand children’s health insurance.
Sanders sniped over Twitter on Wednesday: “Most progressives that I know don’t raise millions of dollars from Wall Street” as Clinton, a former senator from New York, has done.
WOOING YOUNG AND NEW VOTERS
Clinton acknowledged after Iowa that she has “some work” ahead to appeal to young and first-time voters whom Sanders has been able to rally. Look for her to highlight her plans to make college more affordable, help small businesses and improve Obama’s health care law.
In Iowa, Sanders’ appeal with young voters was evident: More than 8 in 10 Democratic caucus-goers under 30 came to support him, as did nearly 6 in 10 of those between ages 30 and 44, according to surveys at the precincts. Clinton got the support of 6 in 10 caucus-goers between ages 45 and 64, and 7 in 10 of those 65 and over.
LOWERING EXPECTATIONS
Clinton finds herself on even shakier ground in New Hampshire against Sanders’ home-field advantage, and her campaign has cast her as an underdog against the Vermont senator.
“I know that they tend to favor their neighbors,” she said on CNN’s “Situation Room” this week. “That’s the pattern, the history of the primary. And Sen. Sanders is a neighbor.”
In 2008, Clinton won the New Hampshire primary even though the neighboring Massachusetts senator and Democratic patriarch, Ted Kennedy, had endorsed Obama.
LOOKING AHEAD
This is a nationally televised debate, so Clinton and Sanders will be talking not just to New Hampshire voters, but to Democrats in coming primaries among more diverse electorates.
After New Hampshire, the next-up primaries in Nevada and South Carolina are tests for how well Sanders can perform among Latinos, who are a strong presence in Nevada, and African-Americans, who make up a majority of South Carolina’s Democratic electorate. In contrast, Iowa and New Hampshire are both overwhelmingly white and allow Sanders to capitalize on his strengths among urban white liberals and people on college campuses.
Listen for Clinton’s heavy emphasis on Obama’s health law, which she says she wants to build on while Sanders would switch to a government-paid health system. She’s also likely to hammer Sanders on his mixed record on gun control.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
Soooooo ! Just when is Joe Biden going to jump back in and win this mess?
Rick’s Ramblings Continue……..
Rights & Liberties:
Our way of life in America has changed dramatically over the past 70 years and many of those changes have not been positive. An erosion of our liberties, our rights and our privileges has occurred, through uncontrolled legislation replacing the power of the people, with the power of large cumbersome non-effective bureaucratic government, narrowly biased judicial rulings made presumptive that we cannot attend to our own lives and responsibilities and by outright lazy complaisance by our electorate, who has abdicated our solemn duty and responsibility, by giving away our vote, by not exercising it..
Another change, of significant proportions, shook our lives on September 11, 2001, when we were attacked on our own soil, by avowed enemies of our sovereign nation and cherished way of life. Terrorism has become a new way of life in our once; just, fair and promising republic. The sum of 70 years of power assuming, by big government is rampant and yet it does not exercise either responsibility or accountability, to our citizens, to those who suffer directly and indirectly by the loss of our liberty and rights. These are all products of turning over our constitutional guarantees, for benignly empty political promises of it all being for the common good and safety.
As the mood of the World decays to anger, resentments and bitterness, pitting country against country and neighbor against neighbor, those who orchestrate such things sit back and glibly smile, knowing they will be the ones who will prosper from such disorder and chaos. Means and ends, good and evil, all begin to blend and blur, into declarations of selfish and not so righteous indignation and justification.
Picking up colorful banners of cause and history, new crusades are built, on the countless bodies of thousands of earlier crusades. Those who profess God, by many names, find themselves in the god-less acts, of man’s inhumanity to man.
We, as a nation, have spent the past 70 years painting ourselves into a dangerous corner, from now which, I fear, there may be no escaping. In spite of efforts to assure us otherwise, it appears, no Moses, this time, will appear to lead us out of the wilderness.
The puppets of the powerful pundants, prince’s, potentates, popes and patronizing patricians play with our political parties, who incestuously cross-breed and produce idiots, morons and lots of bastards, but no thoughtful leaders.
The country desperately needs an enema……
Richard G. Shuster, RandomlyRamblingRick, Rights & Liberties, Northern Nevada Veterans Writing Project
When is Sanders ever going to go for the juggler? Attacking Clinton on Trust, Truth and her sell-out to foreign donors as well as authorizing selling 1/4 of our uranium to enemies.
Sanders is on a short leash. Ain’t gonna happen. He would have chopped the vile beast head off by now if he was going to.
Just a big and expensive farce.
We all know that if Hilary is indicted, the party will ignore the winner by default: Bernie.
That is the way democracy is practiced in the US Socialo-Democratic party.
Who cares what two cackling hens are crowing about. This is all smoke and mirrors anyway. Just by what transpired in Iowa with the DemonRat party shows what their real intention is. The coronation of Queen Hildabeast.The most vile piece of cow dung to ever run for Potus.