FLINT, Mich. — Sen. Bernie Sanders, anxious that the Democratic nomination is slipping away from him, launched a series of cutting and sarcastic attacks against Hillary Clinton over trade, welfare reform and Wall Street in a debate Sunday night that often felt like a war over Bill Clinton's legacy and the moderate Democratic policies of the 1990s.
Even Hillary Clinton joined in the repudiation of her husband's 1994 crime bill and 1996 welfare law, which both disproportionately harmed African-Americans. Both she and Sanders are aggressively courting black voters in Michigan, Ohio and other racially diverse states that hold primaries over the next nine days, but Sanders has an urgent need to cut into Clinton's support among African-Americans.
Sanders, who has fallen far behind Clinton in their all-important race to accumulate delegates to clinch the party's nomination, has rarely been so aggressive. He portrayed Clinton as an unapologetic champion of free trade for much of her career, in hopes of hurting her with Rust Belt Democrats. He tied her aggressively to the North American Free Trade Agreement, Bill Clinton's signature trade policy, and to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, President Barack Obama's 12-nation trade pact, which she supported as secretary of state but then denounced as a presidential candidate.
Sanders also attacked Hillary Clinton's support of the federal Export-Import Bank, the credit agency that anti-government populists on both sides have called an instrument of "corporate welfare," and he feigned amazement when she expressed criticism of some trade deals.
"Secretary Clinton has discovered religion on this issue, but it's a little bit too late," Sanders said. "I was on a picket line in the early 1990s against NAFTA, because you didn't need a Ph.D. in economics to understand that American workers should not be forced to compete against people in Mexico making 25 cents an hour."
For the most part, Clinton deftly parried her rival's arguments, deriding many of them and agreeing with a few, and at times interrupting Sanders in hopes of provoking a testy explosion.
Sanders grew visibly angry at times, though he was not as volatile as the Republican candidates have been in recent debates.
When he attacked Clinton over what he called "the Wall Street bailout where some of your friends destroyed the economy," she tried to cut him off.
"Excuse me, I'm talking," he said.
After a brief dramatic pause, Clinton said sharply, "If you're going to talk, tell the whole story."
"Let me tell my story and you tell yours," Sanders shot back.
Clinton, who is focused on protecting her delegate lead, sought to stay positive, pointing to more salutary achievements from her husband's two terms.
"If we're going to talk about the 1990s, let's talk about 23 million new jobs — incomes went up for everybody, median African-American income went up 33 percent at the end of the '90s, and we lifted more people out of poverty than at any other time in recent history," she said.
The focus on the economic fortunes of African-Americans had a powerful setting in Sunday's debate: Flint, a city in the midst of a public health emergency over lead-tainted water, and a symbol of a middle class that rose to prosperity with the auto industry, but where 42 percent of the majority African-American population now lives below the poverty line.
Clinton came armed with a resonant retort to Sanders over his Wall Street attacks, reminding the Michigan audience that Sanders voted against the auto industry bailout and again calling him a "single issue" candidate too narrowly focused on Wall Street.
"If everybody had voted the way he did, I believe the auto industry would have collapsed, taking 4 million jobs with it," she said.
Sanders allowed that perhaps he was a single-issue candidate. "My one issue is trying to rebuild a disappearing middle class," he said.
The candidates also grew testy on gun control. When the father of a young girl injured in a recent shooting in nearby Kalamazoo asked what the candidates would do about gun control, Clinton criticized Sanders. "Giving immunity to gun makers and sellers was a terrible mistake because it removed any accountability from the makers and the sellers," she said, referring to Sanders' position.
"Maybe I'm wrong, but what you're really talking about is people saying, let's end gun manufacturing in America," Sanders said of the immunity issue. "That's the implication of that and I don't agree with that."
When Clinton pounced again, Sanders was terse: "Can I finish please? All right?"
More than she has in past debates, Clinton sought to reach out to Sanders' supporters in hopes of uniting the factions of the Democratic Party in anticipation of a general election campaign.
Instead of looking away as Sanders spoke, as she often did in past debates, Clinton watched him and nodded frequently as he talked about Flint. She colorfully agreed with him in the debate's opening moments when, after Sanders decried the water crisis, she said, "Amen to that." For the first time she echoed his call for the resignation of Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan (or, alternatively, she said he should be recalled).
"I know the state of Michigan has a rainy-day fund for emergencies," Clinton said. "It is raining lead in Flint."
But at Sunday's debate, Sanders struck some more aggressive notes on Flint than he had in the past, embracing Clinton's call to have the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention evaluate the health of every adult and child in the city. "Federal government comes in, federal government acts," Sanders said.
Clinton then sounded some tougher notes, saying that she would "have a full investigation to determine who knew what when" in the Environmental Protection Agency, and that "people should be fired." Sanders followed with an even sharper statement, saying, "President Sanders would fire anybody who knew about what was happening and did not act accordingly."
The Flint debate was the first since the South Carolina primary, when Clinton began to open up a commanding lead over Sanders in the race for the 2,383 delegates needed to clinch the Democratic nomination. On Sunday night, she sought to protect her edge with African-Americans, who have helped her more than any other constituency.
She pushed back against a question from a CNN debate moderator, Don Lemon, about why black voters should trust her promises to reform the criminal justice system since she supported the 1994 crime bill, which sent so many black men to prison.
Clinton noted that Sanders had voted for the bill, but she then criticized it, saying, "Too many families were broken up, too many communities were adversely affected." But when Lemon pressed Clinton about why African-Americans should stand by her, she struggled a bit: "Senator Sanders voted for it as well," she said. "Are you going to ask him that question?"
Sanders said there were parts of the legislation, like the Violence Against Women Act and the assault weapons ban, which he supported. "There are bills in Congress that have bad stuff. There are bills in Congress that have good stuff — good stuff and bad stuff in the same bill," he said, as Clinton nodded.
When each candidate was asked about racial blind spots, Clinton said, "Being a white person in the United States of America, I know that I've never had the experience that so many of the people in this audience have had." She urged white people to think about what it's like for African-American parents "to have the talk with your kids" about potentially getting in trouble with the police because of the color of their skin.
Sanders spoke of friends who were discriminated against decades ago and of the Black Lives Matter movement today. "When you're white, you don't know what it's like to be living in a ghetto, you don't know what it's like to be poor," he said. "You don't know what it's like to be hassled when you walk down the street or get dragged out of a car."
One of Clinton's most uncomfortable moments came when she was asked about her comments in a 1996 speech about crime in which she referred to some young urban gang members as "super predators." Clinton said that it had been "a poor choice of words" and that she had not used the term since then.
Sanders, who seldom speaks of his Jewish faith, answered a question about it by saying he was "very proud of being Jewish" and called it "an essential part of who I am as a human being." Recalling that his father's family was "wiped out by Hitler in the Holocaust," he added, "I know what crazy and radical and extremist politics mean. I learned that lesson as a tiny, tiny child."
Clinton said she prays each day. "I need that strength and I need that support," she said. "I pray for the will of God to be known so that we can know it and, to the best of our limited ability, try to follow it and fulfill it."