BROKLYN DEBATE TAKEAWAYS: SACARSM,SNIDENESS AND SMACKDOWNS

BROKYLN DEBATE TAKEAWAYS:SACARSM,SNIDENESS AND SMACKDOWNS

 

The New York Times Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Hillary Clinton on Thursday in Brooklyn, where they displayed new flashes of impatience and even contempt toward each other.

The Democratic debate on Thursday night played out as a magnified version of the primary race. The personal clashes between Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont were harsher. Their policy differences gaped wider. And the stakes, for both candidates, were as high as they have ever been.

The debate unfolded in an atmosphere of obvious tension, as the candidates’ policy disputes and personal resentments flared and the raucous New York crowd goaded them on.

Here are some of the most revealing takeaways:

This rivalry has curdled

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders displayed new flashes of impatience and even contempt toward each other. They raised their voices early and often, talking over and past each other.

Mr. Sanders, especially, turned sarcastic. When Mrs. Clinton boasted of having stood up to Wall Street banks, he noted that the banks subsequently paid her handsomely for speaking engagements. “They must have been very, very upset by what you did,” he said mockingly.

Later in the evening, Mrs. Clinton vented frustration with Mr. Sanders. Any time he disagrees with someone, she said, “then you are a member of the establishment.”

Both candidates say they are committed to party unity in a general election, but they are not doing anything to make an eventual healing easier.

Sanders defies traditional view on Israel

Perhaps the most striking exchange of the night came on the issue of Israel, when Mr. Sanders repeatedly challenged Mrs. Clinton to be more critical of Israel’s past military actions in Gaza and insistently argued that the United States must take a more “evenhanded” approach to Israel and the Palestinians.

“We are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity,” Mr. Sanders said, adding, “We are going to have to say that Netanyahu is not right all of the time.”

The last time New York had a competitive Democratic primary, in 1992, this kind of message might have been suicidal. Jewish voters play an influential role in New York primaries, and top-to-bottom support for Israel has long been considered essential here. Mrs. Clinton took such a conventional position on Thursday night, declining to deliver any specific critique of Israel’s conduct.

Mrs. Clinton’s position is probably the safer one. But Democrats — including many Jewish Democrats — have moved left on Middle East policy in recent years. And with Mr. Sanders’s core admirers, his unapologetic opposition may draw an enthusiastic response.

Clinton struggles to be straightforward

Even this late in the race, Mrs. Clinton has not figured out how to address Mr. Sanders’s most familiar lines of attack — and the moderators’ most predictable angles of scrutiny.

Pressed on Thursday to release transcripts of her paid speeches, Mrs. Clinton tried to change the subject, demanding that Mr. Sanders release his tax returns. Asked to share any regrets about the 1994 crime bill she helped champion, Mrs. Clinton offered an awkwardly constructed apology “for the consequences that were unintended.”

On the minimum wage, Mrs. Clinton walked an exceedingly careful line, saying that, as president, she would sign a federal law setting a $15 threshold, even though she has endorsed a lower wage level on the campaign trail.

Mr. Sanders, as an unabashed man of the left, does not deal in ambiguity. As Mrs. Clinton wrestled with the minimum wage question, he said dryly, “I think the secretary has confused a lot of people.”

Sanders, once again, is routed on guns

Mrs. Clinton used Mr. Sanders’s record on the Second Amendment forcefully against him, detailing his support for giving gun makers immunity from lawsuits and highlighting his sometimes-friendly relationship with the National Rifle Association in Vermont.

For Mr. Sanders, the subject is a political cul-de-sac. He sought to explain his gun liability vote as a measure to protect rural firearms merchants. But even that position places him at odds with Mrs. Clinton, and with the majority of New York Democrats who support the most restrictive forms of gun control.

Mrs. Clinton played up the moment with an emotionally charged evocation of gun violence in the state. “I have spent more time than I care to remember,” she said, “being with people who have lost their loved ones.”

It’s still realism vs. revolution

The overarching split between the candidates was — and has long been — about their theories of political action. Mr. Sanders is promising a root-and-branch overhaul of the American political system. Mrs. Clinton is promising a dogged pursuit of mainstream liberal goals.

On Thursday night, the candidates articulated this difference in their bluntest language to date. Mrs. Clinton persistently cast her opponent as a kind of activist heckler. Seemingly exasperated by her rival’s criticism of a climate accord she helped broker, she jabbed: “It’s easy to diagnose the problem. It’s harder to do something about the problem.”

Mr. Sanders was unrelenting in his demand for more drastic policy change. Facing an environmental “crisis of historical consequence,” Mr. Sanders said, “incrementalism, and those little steps, are not enough.”

This philosophical rift among the Democrats has rarely been stated more clearly.