Clinton, Sanders take new combative tone into first one-on-one debate

The fight over the definition of “progressive” dominated the first half of the debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders Thursday on MSNBC, the first head-to-head debate between the two.

Sanders held the former secretary of state to a whisper-thin margin of victory in Iowa’s leadoff caucuses, and polls show he has a big lead in New Hampshire.

The central conflict at the debate centered on who could rightly claim the title of being “progressive”, and thus deserving of the candidacy for the country’s left-leaning party. Along with her tone-deaf answer Wednesday night about why she accepted $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs-“It’s what they offered”-she must rethink her insistence that Sanders focuses too much on Wall Street, because it’s “just one street”.

“I’ve got their number on all that”, she said of “the Wall Street guys”.

“I’m fighting for people who can not wait for those changes, and I’m not making promises that I can not keep”, she said.

The pair also clashed on foreign policy.

“Let’s ask why it is that we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs, and your medicine can be doubled tomorrow, and there’s nothing the government can do to stop it”, Sanders said.

“I was at that table, I was exercising my judgment to advise the president on what to do”, Clinton said, adding that her experience is “a big part of the job interview”. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt, and Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton spar during a Democratic presidential primary debate hosted by MSNBC at the University of New Hampshire Thur…

Sanders is glossing over the initial version of his campaign ad. She’s sick of Sanders casting himself as the protector of the progressive realm against the corrupting influence of the Clintons, and she is ready to extinguish the Bern now.

“I helped lead the effort against deregulation”, Sanders said. “I think it’s time to end the very artful smear that you and your campaign have been carrying out”, Clinton said at the height of the heated debate. That was after Clinton’s campaign manager referred to New Hampshire as Sanders’ “backyard”. His platform also poses the election as a choice between taking on “the enormous economic and political power of the billionaire class” or continuing to “slide into economic and political oligarchy”. As such, she’s used words like complex, complicated, difficult, and hard nearly twice as often as Sanders in debates, and she’s used the phrase “I know” to highlight her policy and political chops 33 times, compared to just nine times for Sanders.

After the debate, the Clinton campaign blasted Sanders on foreign policy, accusing him of drawing a clumsy comparison between the USA policy of opening diplomatic relations with Cuba and the proper way to approach Iran, which remains locked in confrontation with Washington despite the clinching of a nuclear deal a year ago.

The email issue continues to hang over the Clinton campaign – and the question of whether there’s some ticking timebomb there that could decimate her campaign in a general election after she wins the nomination. Almost three-quarters of those in the 30 to 39-year-old group also back the senator, the poll found. The only category in which Sanders loses to Clinton is among voters aged 65 and older.

It was their first head-to-head debate and their last before Tuesday’s primary. “That is not arguable in foreign affairs, but experience is not the only point”, Sanders admitted.

This week, Sanders said Clinton is a progressive “on some days”. Mrs Clinton voted for the war – a fact that anti-war Democratic voters did not forget when she ran against Mr Obama in 2008. “And once again, back in 2002, when we both looked at the same evidence about the wisdom of the war in Iraq, one of us voted the right way and one of us didn’t”.

In a moment of agreement, Clinton and Sanders said they do not want to see large numbers of USA ground troops return to the Middle East. They supported a limited role as providing assistance, through supplies, weapons and special forces – but not a large ground force.