Bustle: How Do Bernie Sanders & Hillary Clinton Know One Another?
How Do Bernie Sanders & Hillary Clinton Know One Another? They Actually Get Along Pretty Well
SETH MILLSTEIN
Bustle
According to an extensively-reported piece in Politico, Clinton and Sanders have a working relationship that stretches all the way back to the 1992 presidential campaign, when Sanders was a congressman and Clinton was a lawyer and the first lady of Arkansas. Sanders wrote to Clinton early in the campaign to promote a cancer research bill he’d written in the House of Representatives; he later endorsed Clinton’s husband for president and joined the two on the campaign trail.
But ideologically, Sanders and Clinton have always been pretty far apart. Throughout their careers, Sanders was one of Congress' most liberal members, while Clinton was a staunch centrist Democrat. This divide came to a head in 1993, when Clinton, recently appointed to head the White House’s task force on health care reform, held a meeting with the Vermont senator to discuss the reform effort.
Sanders was (and is) a proponent of single-payer health care — government-provided health care, generally regarded as one of the most leftist mainstream health care proposals in American politics. Sanders, accompanied by two Harvard physicians, made the case for single-payer, and asked Clinton to include it in her proposal. Clinton, while amenable to the idea, was skeptical.
Yet despite this and other disagreements on policy, Sanders and Clinton never became enemies on a personal level. Sanders stood by the Clintons in two widely-covered public dust-ups: The Whitewater controversy, a largely trumped-up scandal during the 1992 campaign involving the Clintons’ real estate dealings, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Sanders opposed both congressional investigations into Whitewater and Republicans’ attempts to impeach Clinton.
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