Victors in Iowa, Sanders and Buttigieg Are Targets in Democratic Debate - The New York Times
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MANCHESTER, N.H. — The two victors in the Iowa caucuses, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., came under sharp and sustained criticism in a Democratic presidential debate on Friday, as the group of candidates assailed Mr. Sanders for his left-wing policy platform and pushed Mr. Buttigieg onto the defensive over his light experience in government.
In the opening stages of the most contentious debate so far, taking place four days before the New Hampshire primary, the runners-up in the Iowa contest charged at the winners in a bid to stop their momentum, focusing above all on the question of whether they could triumph in the general election.
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. warned that nominating Mr. Sanders would brand down-ballot Democratic candidates with the label of socialism, while asserting that Mr. Buttigieg had shown no ability to mobilize black and Latino voters.
Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, another moderate, said Democrats could not defeat “the divider in chief” by nominating a divisive candidate of their own, and in an even blunter exchange she accused Mr. Buttigieg of presenting himself as a “cool newcomer” by dismissing the value of service in Washington.
Mr. Sanders and Mr. Buttigieg gave no ground to their critics, arguing determinedly for their distinctive theories of the 2020 campaign. Mr. Sanders insisted that Democrats would win if they campaigned on “an agenda that works for the working people of this country,” reigniting a now-familiar debate about the practicality of single-payer health care. And Mr. Buttigieg batted away skepticism about his relative inexperience.
“I freely admit that if you’re looking for the person with the most years of Washington establishment experience under their belt,” he said, “then you’ve got your candidate and of course it’s not me.”
The gibe drew forceful pushback from both Mr. Biden and Ms. Klobuchar, who quoted back to Mr. Buttigieg a dry line he delivered in Iowa, saying he found the impeachment proceedings “exhausting” and would have preferred to watch cartoons. She suggested Mr. Buttigieg was taking an unserious approach by playing to voters’ distaste for the federal government.
“It’s easy to go after Washington, because that’s a popular thing to do,” Ms. Klobuchar said. “It is much harder to lead and much harder to take those difficult positions.”
And Ms. Klobuchar drew a biting comparison between Mr. Buttigieg’s outsider message and that of the Democrats’ shared adversary: “We got a newcomer in the White House,” she said, “and look where it got us.”
The debate came at a moment of tumult and anxiety for Democrats, whose leadoff contest in Iowa on Monday turned into a fiasco of technical breakdowns, stalled and fumbled vote-counting and accusations of electoral illegitimacy from multiple presidential campaigns. On Friday afternoon, Mr. Buttigieg and Mr. Sanders both claimed victory in Iowa on different grounds, with Mr. Sanders brandishing his lead in the popular vote and Mr. Buttigieg staking his claim on a hairbreadth lead over Mr. Sanders in state delegates, the traditional metric for judging a winner in the caucuses there.
The discussion of electability was not confined to Mr. Sanders and Mr. Buttigieg: Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, hammering at a theme that has come to define her campaign, argued that Democrats could unite their party and win crossover support in the general election by campaigning against corruption. “We can bring in independents and Republicans on that,” Ms. Warren said. “They hate the corruption as well.”
And Tom Steyer, the wealthy investor, also cast a skeptical nod toward Mr. Buttigieg, arguing that the eventual nominee must “be able to go toe-to-toe with” President Trump on the debate stage, and for that reason he was “worried about Mayor Pete.”
Mr. Steyer said the Democratic nominee had to be able to win support from minority voters, a feat he noted Mr. Buttigieg had not yet managed. By contrast, Mr. Steyer added, in an awkwardly clinical turn of phrase, that a recent poll showed that he had “24 percent of blacks in South Carolina” supporting him.
The lively back-and-forth, involving nearly all of the seven candidates onstage, showed that, for all the apparent momentum behind Mr. Buttigieg and Mr. Sanders, none of their opponents appeared poised to stand down and give way.
But Mr. Biden also conceded in his first answer that the political currents were against him in the primary on Tuesday, and tried to set high expectations for Mr. Sanders, who captured New Hampshire easily in his 2016 presidential primary campaign.
“I took a hit in Iowa and I’ll probably take a hit here,” Mr. Biden said, adding, “Bernie won by 20 points last time.”
Even as Mr. Sanders defended himself from his current rivals, he sought to tamp down tensions with his previous primary opponent, Hillary Clinton, who has repeatedly criticized him this month.
“Our job is to look forward and not back to 2016,” he said. “And I hope that Secretary Clinton and all of us can come together and move forward.”
At a moment when Mr. Sanders’s supporters are assailing Iowa Democrats and the Democratic National Committee for the chaotic aftermath of the caucuses there, claiming that he was the victim of an establishment plot, his remarks were an indication he wanted to defuse tensions with the party establishment.
While the candidates attacked and counter-attacked one another with gusto, they saved their most searing critiques for Mr. Trump. Mr. Biden even played to the Democratic-leaning live audience on the campus of Saint Anselm College by urging them to stand and applaud for Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, the decorated Iraq war veteran on the White House National Security Council staff who testified in the impeachment hearings and was marched out of the White House Friday.“Stand up and clap for Vindman,” Mr. Biden said. “That’s who we are. We are not who Trump is.”
The clash between the Democratic candidates on Friday evening in Manchester had the potential to set the primary race on a new trajectory after the Iowa caucuses — or to scramble, once again, a nomination fight that has long resisted clear definition.
Mr. Buttigieg and Mr. Sanders both entered the debate with a chance to cement their claims on their respective wings of the party, with Mr. Buttigieg emerging from a strong finish in Iowa to present himself as a leader of more centrist forces and Mr. Sanders establishing a clear upper hand over Ms. Warren on the left.
Polls in New Hampshire this week suggested that Mr. Sanders and Mr. Buttigieg had the best chance of winning the state’s primary; if one of them prevailed here, it could bolster the winner’s prospects in the Nevada caucuses and South Carolina primary later this month, and across the Super Tuesday landscape in early March.
But neither man has an open path forward, and even a commanding debate performance would seem unlikely to change that. Mr. Sanders has continued to struggle to grow his support beyond a sizable progressive faction, and as long as Ms. Warren remains a dogged competitor he is unlikely to be able to unify the left behind his candidacy. Mr. Buttigieg, meanwhile, still trails Mr. Biden by a wide margin in national polls, and moderate voters continue to be divided among the two of them and Ms. Klobuchar.
Mr. Biden in particular was under considerable pressure to deliver a reassuring performance in New Hampshire — starting with the debate — after his slump in Iowa. His campaign appears to be under financial strain, and on Friday it announced a staff shake-up, elevating the veteran Democratic strategist Anita Dunn over his campaign manager and other advisers.
For Mr. Biden, Ms. Warren and Ms. Klobuchar, the debate appeared to be the best opportunity to rally support and ignite the kind of new energy that could give one of them a chance to pull off an upset on Tuesday. And Mr. Biden is not alone in showing signs of strain on the fund-raising front: Ms. Warren trimmed back her television advertising in some places this week, while Andrew Yang, the entrepreneur who finished near the back of the pack in Iowa, laid off some members of his staff. After staking her campaign on Iowa, Ms. Klobuchar could well be nearing the end of her resources after a fifth-place finish there.
The results in Iowa pointed to a fractured Democratic primary electorate with no candidate yet emerging as a clear front-runner. Five different candidates recorded support in the double digits — Mr. Buttigieg, Mr. Sanders, Ms. Warren, Mr. Biden and Ms. Klobuchar — and the top finishers earned little more than a quarter of the vote. Unless one of those candidates rises to sweep the remainder of the February contests, there is a high likelihood that Democrats will be headed for a long season of indecision, dragged out over dozens of primary elections.
But events in Washington, as much as in Iowa, have made this a trying moment for Democratic voters, who are singularly focused on selecting a nominee capable of defeating Mr. Trump. The continuing debacle of the Iowa caucuses coincided with Mr. Trump’s acquittal of impeachment charges by the Republican-controlled Senate, and a jobs report on Friday that suggested the economy remained in sturdy condition. While the president is unpopular by historical standards, he looks to be far from a pushover in the general election.
Perhaps befitting those stakes, the tenor of the Democratic race grew sharply more combative this week, as Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders shifted their footing to take on Mr. Buttigieg more directly. After trying to ignore his rivals and stay above the fray for most of the race, Mr. Biden appeared suddenly to recognize the urgency of the threats to his campaign, and in New Hampshire he bluntly questioned Mr. Buttigieg’s qualifications for the presidency.
Democrats, Mr. Biden said, should not “nominate someone who’s never held an office higher than the mayor of a town of 100,000 people in Indiana.”
And Mr. Sanders, who has also largely avoided confrontation and focused instead on hammering away at his core message about economic inequality, argued at an event in Manchester on Friday morning that Mr. Buttigieg was too beholden to the wealthy people who “control not only our economy but our political system.”
Yet even as Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders trained their criticism at the former mayor, both men also took aim at other candidates, including each other. Mr. Biden urged Democrats not to choose a far-left nominee, plainly alluding to Mr. Sanders when the former vice president told voters this week that Mr. Trump was “desperate to pin the socialist label” on all Democratic candidates. Mr. Sanders accused former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, who is not competing in New Hampshire, of seeking to buy the nomination with his multibillion-dollar fortune.
In an email newsletter sent out by aides, the Sanders campaign attacked Mr. Buttigieg and Mr. Bloomberg even more bluntly: “You can’t change a corrupt system by taking its money,” said the message, which described Mr. Buttigieg as “the chosen candidate of billionaires” and “the chosen candidate of the health care industry”
Other contenders have been eager to do battle in New Hampshire, too: Mr. Steyer, the wealthy former hedge fund manager whose campaign has focused chiefly on Nevada and South Carolina, began airing a commercial swiping at both Mr. Biden and Mr. Buttigieg and urging Democrats not to “nominate another insider or an untested newcomer who doesn’t have the experience to beat Trump on the economy.”
So far, Ms. Warren and Ms. Klobuchar have diverged from other candidates in declining to seek out fresh conflict in New Hampshire. But Ms. Klobuchar has proved comfortable clashing with her rivals in previous debates and, more than any other candidate, she has proved willing to take on Mr. Buttigieg and raise questions about his political credentials and claims to electoral strength.
2020-02-08 02:24:00Z
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