Democratic Presidential Candidates Set to Take Stage at Town Hall

Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders will gather in Columbia, SC Tuesday night for a town hall event prior to voters going to the polls for the Democratic Party primary Saturday. As he has before, he stressed that it would come from taxing speculative investment transactions, and he pointed out that other countries spend less on health care than the USA does while providing universal coverage.

Fellow student Hugh Benfer, who is also 19 and majoring in systems mechanical engineering, says he supports Sanders because he’s more down-to-Earth and consistent.

The Vermont senator previously said it was up to Clinton to decide whether to release transcripts from her paid speeches. “Why is there one standard for me and not for everyone else?” she asked.

At a Democratic debate from earlier this month, Clinton said she would “look into” releasing the texts. The mere public airing of various suggestions of corruption will hurt Clinton’s campaign no matter how she handles them. I want you to be able to refinance your debt at much lower interest rates.

On other issues, she promised to defend and expand the Affordable Care Act to bring health insurance to more Americans, and to find ways to get more money into the Social Security trust fund, while resisting Republican attempts to privatize Social Security.

“We have serious challenges and I think it is important for people, and particularly for white people, to be honest about those”, Clinton said at the town hall.

Clinton has 502 delegates to Sanders’ 70, according to the latest tally by the Associated Press; 2,383 delegates are needed to win the nomination. Bernie Sanders carried over 80 percent of the under 30 vote in the first three primaries.

“We have spent a lot of time talking with voters in the last week about the barriers they felt did impede their getting ahead”, said Clinton, who has been portraying Sanders as a single-issue candidate – implicitly arguing that while his anti-Wall Street rhetoric might be popular, it can not alone be the basis for an entire presidency.

It was back in 2008 that President Obama took hold of a strong victory over Hillary Clinton thanks to the more than 50 percent African-American Democratic electorate.

Sanders accused Republicans, including GOP front-runner Donald Trump, of leading a racist effort to try to de-legitimize the nation’s first black president by questioning Barack Obama’s birthplace.

I’m referring of course to Donald Trump. “I have been in the public arena for 25 years”.

Toward the end of their sessions, each candidate touched on spiritual matters. “When we do the right thing, we are more human”, he said. Probably the greatest revelation of the evening was that folks in SC like to ask long, slow questions, often with an elaborate preface.

When the cousin of a Charleston church shooting victim asked a deeply personal question about guns, Sanders’s immediate response was his voting record: “To begin with, let me just say this: I have a D- voting record from the NRA”. What’s more, there’s not much evidence that Sanders’ younger voters are more motivated to turn out for him than are Clinton’s older ones.