he Debate in Brooklyn Was Sanders’s Best Yet. But Was It Enough?

[eridani]

http://www.thenation.com/article/the-debate-in-brooklyn-was-sanderss-best-yet-but-was-it-enough/

Sanders, on the other hand, was still far too prone to lapse into excerpts from his stump speech, still fuzzy on the attack, and still either unwilling or unable to counter Clinton’s ultimate defense: Obama, Obama, Obama, Obama. Time and again Clinton turned a tricky question—CNN’s panel tonight were the sharpest I’ve seen in any debate by either party—into a referendum on a third Obama term.

Yet this was also Sanders’s best performance by far, partly because he’s raised his game. When Clinton claimed, as she always does, that she “called out” the big banks, Sanders replied with sarcasm that actually stung: “Secretary Clinton called them out, my goodness—they must have been really crushed by this. And was this before or after you received huge sums of money by giving speaking engagements?”

But mainly because Sanders showed, again and again, that he really is a different kind of politician waging a different kind of campaign. When Clinton, predictably, asked about Sanders’s tax returns, and the panel, quite properly, followed up, Sanders said he’d release his 2014 return “tomorrow.” No equivocation. When asked why he’d criticized Clinton for referring to black youths as “super-predators” Sanders replied with devastating candor: “Because it was a racist term. And everybody knew it was a racist term.”

Most astonishingly—at least to me, perhaps because I’ve been following New York politicians for 30 years—when Wolf Blitzer “went there” on Israel, and asked Sanders whether he stood by his comment that Israel’s response to attacks in the 2014 Gaza war had been “disproportionate,” Sanders actually doubled down, saying that the number of civilian deaths indicated the response was indeed disproportionate, adding, “If we are ever going to bring peace to that region…we are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity,” and that “there comes a time when you have to say that Netanyahu isn’t right all of the time.” Which won’t win him any votes in Borough Park. Here, again, Clinton repeatedly dodged the question.

[Cowpunk]

1. Yes, and I thought Hillary did poorly

She often stuttered and stumbled before giving her non-answers. She was so clearly trying to eat up the clock by rambling on and on while both the moderators and Bernie were trying to get a word in.