Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders took their fight over who is more progressive off Twitter and into prime time on Wednesday night, continuing the ongoing squabble over their liberal bona fides at a CNN Democratic presidential forum.
The candidates did not appear on stage together, but in separate interviews with anchor Anderson Cooper, angled to appeal to the party’s liberal base.
{mosads}Sanders opened by methodically ticking through the issues that he says call Clinton’s progressive bona fides into question, as he sought to frame the former secretary of State as a centrist who lacks commitment to liberal principles.
Cooper asked Sanders whether he believes Clinton is a “progressive.”
The Vermont senator got up from his seat and made a show of saying he’s running a positive campaign, before laying out a blistering attack against Clinton on a host of issues.
Sanders accused Clinton of being in the pocket of the big banks.
“I do not know any progressive who has a super-PAC and takes $15 million from Wall Street,” he said. “That’s just not progressive.”
He pointed to her 2002 vote authorize war in Iraq, saying she was on the wrong side of the “most important foreign policy vote in modern American history.”
“The progressive community was pretty united, and said don’t listen to Bush, don’t go to war,” Sanders said. “Secretary Clinton voted to go to war.”
He said she has supported trade policies that liberals warned would harm low-wage earners in the U.S.
“Virtually all of the trade unions and workers understand that our trade policies … have been written by corporate America and the goal of it is to be able to throw American workers out on the street,” Sanders said. “Secretary Clinton has been a supporter in the past of these trade polices.”
And Sanders noted that it took Clinton longer than many Democrats to oppose the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
“Every sensible person understands that climate change is real and caused by humans and we’ve got to transform our energy away from fossil fuel,” the Independent lawmaker said. “For a long time Secretary Clinton was talking about the benefits of the Keystone pipeline. There are no benefits to excavating and transporting some of the dirtiest fossil fuel in the world.”
In the middle of Sanders’s broadside, the Clinton campaign’s rapid response team sent out an email blast to reporters detailing how “Hillary Clinton has spent her career achieving progressive change.”
When the former first lady took the stage, she declared that she’s a progressive “who likes to get things done” and argued that by Sanders’s standards there are very few progressives.
“I was amused today that Sen. Sanders set himself up to be the gatekeeper on who is a progressive because under the definition flying around on Twitter and statements by the campaign, President Obama would not be a progressive, Joe Biden would not be a progressive, Jeanne Shaheen would not be a progressive, even the late great Sen. Paul Wellstone would not be a progressive,” she said.
“I’m not going to let that bother me,” Clinton continued. “I know what I’ve done, but I don’t think it helps for the senator [to say that] because clearly we all share a lot of the same hopes and aspirations for our country.”
Sanders and Clinton feuded all day on Twitter over who is the true standard-bearer of the progressive movement, with the Clinton campaign pointing to Sanders’s past opposition to new gun control measures.