Sanders and Clinton buried their rancon at the Democratic debate

Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton seemed to patch things up on the debate stage Saturday night over the Sanders camp’s improper access of voter information compiled by Clinton’s campaign. However, Hillary Clinton accepted Sanders’ apologizes.

But the main focus on the debate – for Hillary Clinton – was the Republican Party, especially Donald Trump.

It is an issue that also created unusual political bedfellows, with the Democratic candidates who disagreed with each other finding kindred spirits among the Republican presidential contenders.

Chideya notes that policy makers have been quick to jump onboard with harm-reduction policy “when it comes to heroin and opiates, which are affecting white Americans mainly”. She said that “we are where we need to be” on fighting ISIS and that Obamacare premium hikes are “glitches”, both of which the RNC attacked after the debate.

“Yes, I apologise”, Sanders said replying to a question after he acknowledged that his presidential election campaign “by mistake” intruded into the election data base of Clinton.

That’s why they’ve limited the number of debates between the Democratic hopefuls (the Republicans will hold twice as many) and scheduled them at times few people are likely to watch – Saturday night before Christmas vacation, the weekend the new Star Wars opens.

“It’s very clear that we have a distinct difference between those of us on this stage tonight and all of our Republican counterparts”, she said. Sanders countered with a lawsuit, and the DNC quickly returned access to the campaign.

The Clinton campaign characterized the breach as “illegal” and “a theft”, and called for an investigation, which might be called ironic given their candidate’s past history with email.

She also accused Sanders of hypocrisy for supporting regime change in Libya when he had voted in the Senate for a non-binding resolution that called on Gaddafi to resign and support a peaceful transition to democracy. “If the United States does not lead, there is not another leader”, Clinton said Saturday.

The Sanders campaign appears to be on a financial uptick. We have got to bring together the vast majority of the people who do in fact believe in sensible gun safety regulations. And he said Clinton’s criticism of payroll taxes is out of step with Democratic giants such as Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, who oversaw the creation of Social Security, and Lyndon B. Johnson, who shepherded Medicare into law.

Sanders’ campaign, at the spurring of the candidate, plans to tackle its age gap in the coming weeks by courting older voters and focusing on issues like Social Security and Medicare. “Now that I think we’ve resolved your data, we’ve agreed on an independent inquiry, we should move on. But I think in terms of foreign and military policy, I don’t think she’s much out of the mainstream there”, Devine said.