The frustrated former president delivered laundry list of attacks on Bernie Sanders as Tuesday primary could threaten Hillary Clinton’s place as frontrunner
For years, they called him the Big Dog. And in a modest, middle school gym in small-town New Hampshire, they finally let him bare his teeth.
Campaigning for his wife in the state he still credits for rescuing his own presidential bid when it seemed doomed 24 years ago, Bill Clinton tore into Bernie Sanders, the self-styled “democratic socialist” senator who heads into Tuesday’s vote with a commanding poll lead.
The former president, who had previously confined himself to serving as chief character witness for Hillary Clinton, rattled off a list of what he saw as the inconsistencies, hypocrisies and distortions peddled by the Sanders campaign. “When you’re making a revolution, you can’t be too careful with the facts,” he said acidly, nodding to Sanders’ rallying cry for a “political revolution”.
Wearing a lumberjack shirt and dark jeans, and in his trademark conversational style, he cited an episode when Sanders aides had helped themselves to voter data gathered by the Clinton campaign, mocking their defence as equivalent to protesting that it was legitimate to steal a car if the keys had been left in the ignition.
He went on to fault the Vermont senator’s campaign for lifting quotations out of context from New Hampshire newspapers – to give the impression those papers had backed Sanders when in fact they backed Clinton – and for using a photograph of a war veteran to suggest the man was a Sanders supporter when he was not.
The ex-president, now 69, hit back at the repeated Sanders claims that Clinton is too close to the bankers and hedge fund managers, referring to a CNN report which suggested that Sanders too had benefited from corporate donations. “But you’ll never hear her call him a tool of Wall Street,” he said.
He was especially pointed in his assault on Sanders’ online defenders, the so-called Bernie bros. He said that those who spoke up for Hillary online were subjected to “vicious trolling and attacks that are literally too profane often, not to mention sexist, to repeat”. Other Hillary backers were instantly and unfairly deemed to be “a tool of the establishment”, he said.
As he was eight years ago, when his wife was doing battle with then senator Barack Obama, Clinton seemed irked by the notion that because many of their opponent’s supporters were young and idealistic, their rival was somehow not guilty of deploying the same tricks of the trade as any other politician. The former president was doing his best to tarnish the halo that now hovers above Bernie Sanders’s head.
His frustration was visible. For the second time in eight years, his wife had found herself on the wrong end of a movement in the Democratic party that had stirred passion and enthusiasm among the young. Addressing a crowd that was relatively thin by the standards of the Clinton glory days, and with a visible tremor in one of his hands, it was hard not to see the former president cutting a rather melancholy figure, aware that a new generation was now looking elsewhere.
But he has not lost his gift for framing an argument. Powering Clinton’s 50-minute speech was a deeper debate, one that has become central in the battle for the Democratic nomination: the case for pragmatism over pure principle, the case for what’s possible rather than what’s ideal.
In that spirit, he attacked the Vermont senator’s healthcare plan. “All the experts say the numbers don’t add up,” he said. “Why in the wide world would we take on an unproven scheme … instead of just finishing what we’ve got?” he said, arguing that it was better to improve the Obamacare system than to start from scratch.
On Sanders’ signature call for free college tuition for all – a proposal which has helped win the challenger legions of young supporters – the former president said he understood the appeal. “Free tuition sounds so much better” than his wife’s plan, which would target help on the poorest students, he acknowledged. But her plan would ensure there was more money available to those who needed it, rather than diverting precious funds to children of the affluent.
Again and again, Clinton signalled that he recognized the appetite for a radical, idealistic vision but that realism and incrementalism had a better chance of success. Addressing “all those millennials who are so frustrated”, he said, “You have a right to be angry. But anger must be transformed into answers. Resentment must be transformed into empowerment.”
He cited the current scandal of Flint, Michigan, where local people – many poor and black – have been supplied with water contaminated by lead. He explained what Hillary Clinton had done to get practical help to Flint, while Sanders had simply called for the Michigan’s governor to resign. “It makes you feel good to condemn, but it makes a difference only if you make something happen,” he said.
Having talked for nearly an hour, he ended by saying that it was action, not talk, that mattered: “All this yak, yak, yak will blow away like smoke in the wind.” And with that, and a few handshakes and selfies, he was gone, hoping – against the evidence – that New Hampshire would deliver the Clintons yet another miracle.
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