CHARLESTON, S.C. — Hillary Clinton targeted Bernie Sanders' electoral appeal with some of her strongest language yet in a debate Sunday night, seizing on Sanders' recent policy shifts on universal health care and gun control to try to undercut his image as an anti-political truth teller.
Clinton, whose vast advantages in the Democratic presidential race have been eroded somewhat by Sanders' growing popularity, dropped her monthslong focus on the Republican candidates and sought to raise doubts about what many liberals see as Sanders' greatest virtues: his integrity and consistency on policy issues.
With Sanders gaining ground on Clinton ahead of the Iowa caucuses, just two weeks away, Clinton charged that Sanders' new universal health care plan and its high tax increases would play into the hands of Republicans who want to repeal President Barack Obama's signature Affordable Care Act.
"We've accomplished so much already," Clinton said, painting Sanders as a threat to universal health insurance. "I don't want to see the Republicans repeal it."
"That is nonsense," said Sanders, who pushed back sharply throughout the night. "What a 'Medicare for all' program does is finally provide health care for every man, woman and child as a right." He noted that 29 million people still have no health insurance.
But Clinton refused to stand down. "You know, I have to say I'm not sure we're talking about the plan you just introduced tonight or the plan you introduced nine times in the Congress," she said. "To tear it up and start over again, pushing our country back into that kind of a contentious debate, I think is the wrong direction."
"No one is tearing it up — we're going forward," Sanders said.
If Clinton was trying to make Sanders look less than qualified for the presidency, Sanders repeatedly tried to address doubts about his electability, which a new Clinton television ad has questioned. At one point, he rattled off some of his strong poll numbers, not unlike the leading Republican candidate, Donald Trump.
"When this campaign began, she was 50 points ahead of me," Sanders said. "We were all of 3 percentage points. Guess what? In Iowa and New Hampshire, the race is very, very close."
He added, "In polling, we are running ahead of Secretary Clinton against my good friend Donald Trump."
Sanders also tried to turn the debate over health care and the candidates' positions on Wall Street into a referendum on big money in politics, an implicit criticism of the super PAC and wealthy donors supporting Clinton's campaign.
"It is whether we have the guts to stand up to the private insurance companies and all of their money, and the pharmaceutical industry — that's what this debate is about," he said.
Clinton seized on an opening to remind viewers about her work as first lady to overhaul the health care system, and told the crowd, "I am for huge campaign finance reform."
In contrast to Thursday's Republican debate, which featured frequent attacks on Obama over the Iran nuclear deal, the U.S. strategy against the Islamic State, and the economy, Clinton and Sanders seemed to be trying to outdo each other in aligning themselves to Obama and his agenda. Clinton noted that Sanders had called Obama "weak" and "disappointing," and had suggested in 2011 that Obama should get a Democratic primary opponent. Sanders called himself an ally of Obama on many issues, including health care.
With the debate unfolding just blocks from the shooting last year at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church here, which left nine people dead, the topic of gun control arrived early and evoked emotional responses from all three candidates: Clinton, Sanders and former Gov. Martin O'Malley of Maryland. Sanders said Clinton had been disingenuous in her attacks on his record on gun control and sought to defend his commitment to the issue, saying, "I have a D-minus voting rating from the NRA."
Pressed on his shifting position on a provision of Senate legislation that would have held gun manufacturers and sellers accountable for crimes committed with firearms, Sanders said that while he supported parts of the legislation, "a small mom-and-pop gun shop who sells a gun legally to somebody should not be held liable if someone does something terrible with that gun."
Clinton criticized Sanders for his votes on several gun control measures, including the "Charleston loophole" that allowed Dylann Roof, the gunman in the church attack, to purchase the gun he used. "Let's not forget what this is about," she said, her voice growing more impassioned. "Ninety people a day die from gun violence in this country." She continued, "One of the most horrific examples, not a block from here, where we had nine people murdered."
She also sought to damn Sanders with faint praise by saying she was "pleased" that he had reversed himself on supporting legal immunity for gun manufacturers and dealers. As she listed Sanders' past votes and jabbed at him over the immunity issues, Sanders sighed a couple times in frustration and shook his head.
Clinton's attacks on Sanders in the debate — the final one before the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses and the Feb. 9 New Hampshire primary — reflected her sharpest strategic shift in the campaign so far. For months, she had focused on the Republican field and on drawing policy contrasts between herself and Trump in particular; even in the last Democratic debate in December, Clinton was at her most memorable when she called Trump a threat to the nation's security and a one-man recruiting tool for the Islamic State.
But as polls have tightened in Iowa and Sanders has maintained a small lead in New Hampshire, Clinton has sought to portray the Vermont senator as an inexperienced leader with budget-busting policy proposals that appeal to big crowds but are, in her view, not carefully drawn or realistic to implement. "I'm a progressive, but I'm a progressive who gets things done" has been one of her favorite refrains.
Sanders, in turn, has argued that Clinton is targeting him because she is on the "defensive" after "losing ground" in Iowa and New Hampshire polls, as he said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." With his advisers claiming that Sanders has the political momentum in the race, they said his goals for Sunday's debate were to continue framing her as a status quo candidate whose views are more in tune with well-connected interests — like Wall Street executives, government lobbyists and wealthy Americans — than regular people, and who has been too hawkish in her foreign policy judgment on Syria, Iraq and Libya.
Yet both candidates faced risks as they maneuvered against each other.
Clinton's tougher tack against Sanders, specifically on his health care proposal — a single payer, "Medicare for all" approach — and his record on gun control issues, threatens to hurt her credibility among liberal voters whom she would need to win in a general election and who view her as overly centrist and beholden to her rich donors and Wall Street. That is because both candidates are viewed positively by the Democratic primary electorate.
Some advisers to Clinton — including her husband, former President Bill Clinton — believe her campaign erred by not attacking Sanders early and marginalizing him before his populist message grew into a political movement. By going hard on the offensive now, Hillary Clinton and her campaign risk looking overly negative: an image that hurt her at times in her 2008 race against Obama and that turns off many Democratic voters when the attacks are aimed at another Democrat.
The Clinton camp's aggressiveness also came into question Saturday when her campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, distanced himself from a Clinton ally, David Brock, who coordinates with the campaign to defend Clinton. According to a report in Politico, Brock had planned to demand the 74-year-old Sanders' health records. (Brock later denied the story.)
Sanders' monthslong critique of Clinton — that she is an establishment politician invested in America's "rigged" economic and political system — is so familiar by now that it may not be enough to peel away large numbers of voters from Clinton. Sanders has proved that he is very popular with college students, Democrats under 30, very liberal voters and independents, but he has yet to show that he can expand his message in ways that attract other key groups in a winning Democratic coalition: blacks, Hispanics, middle-age and older women, and moderates.
The third Democratic candidate, O'Malley, has struggled to persuade many voters to consider him seriously as an alternative to Clinton and Sanders.