Campaigning in Iowa ahead of the caucus last week, the former President seemed sent to merely soften his wife's image -- he shared gauzy memories dating back to law school about how everything she ever touched, she made better. But two days before the New Hampshire primary, where Sanders is leading by double digits in the polls, the Big Dog turned into an attack dog.
“When you’re making a revolution, you can’t be too careful with the facts,” he told the crowd of just under 300 who came to hear him speak Sunday afternoon while Hillary Clinton paid a visit to Flint, Michigan, to visit a church. “I want you to laugh, because when you’re mad you can’t think.”
Without mentioning Sanders by name, Clinton recited a laundry list of double standards and lack of details in policy proposals he has identified in Sanders’ campaign — and labeled “her opponent the champion of all things small and the enemy of all things big.”
Clinton, who credits New Hampshire with making him the “comeback kid” in 1992 after he came in second here, challenged Granite State voters to have higher standards when reviewing the candidates on Tuesday.
“The New Hampshire I campaigned in really cared that you knew what you were doing, and how it was paid for,” said Clinton, after ripping into Sanders’ universal healthcare plan and free college for all proposals as impossible to fund.
After explaining how Sanders has wiggled around on the details of his single-payer plan he said: “It is good for America, I don’t think so. Is it good for New Hampshire? I don’t think so. The New Hampshire I knew would not have voted for me if I had done that.”
Clinton accused Sanders of hypocrisy for portraying his wife as beholden to Wall Street because of campaign donations and speaking fees she has accepted from firms like Goldman Sachs. He said he “frankly, fell out of my chair” after reading a CNN report that Sanders has been a prolific Democratic fundraiser, raising cash from the financial sector at retreats in Palm Beach and Martha’s Vineyard. “Anybody who takes money from Goldman Sachs couldn’t possibly be President,” Clinton said. “He may have to tweak that answer a little bit, or we may have to get a write-in candidate.”
And he brought up Sanders’ 2000 vote in favor of the commodities futures modernization act — a bill Clinton signed into law. “He voted for that bill,” he said, ”but you will never hear her say he is a tool of Wall Street because of it, because they made a mistake."
Clinton didn't stop there. He launched into a discussion of the ugly “Bernie Bro” phenomenon that the Sanders campaign has denounced — backers who harass female Clinton supporters online and accuse them of “voting with their vagina” and call them “bitches.”
Clinton called them “vicious trolling and attacks that are literally too profane ... not to mention sexist.”
For months, Bill Clinton’s staff has maintained that he is not obsessed with politics this year and that his main attention is still on the work he does with his Foundation. But his speech on Sunday did away with any notion that he’s not fully involved in every detail of his wife’s campaign.
He railed against how Sanders handled the data breach last December, when his operatives were able to access the Clinton campaign’s voter file because of a breach in the Democratic National Committee’s database — and seemed to know every intricate turn of the somewhat esoteric data scandal.
“It was your campaign that made 25 separate inquiries in the mere space of 30 minutes trying to [loot] information out of computers,” Clinton said, waving off Sanders’ public apology because “in private [his campaign] sent an email complaining [about the DNC] leaving the keys in the car, and said, all I did was drive off.” And Bill Clinton expressed outrage at the chutzpah of Sanders’ campaign to go and raise $1 million off the incident. “You gotta give it to em,” he said, “I mean, that’s really good."
In closing, Clinton reverted back to his more philosophical self noting: “When it’s all said and done, all that matters is whether people are better off, whether young people have a better future. The rest of this is all background noise. All of this back and forth, it will blow away like smoke in the wind.”
Original Article
Source: politico.com/
Author: Annie Karni
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