New York Times
By Patrick Healy and Amy Chozick
March 9, 2016
Hillary
Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders clashed vividly over immigration
reform, health care and Cuba during a contentious debate Wednesday as
the two Democrats appealed to Hispanic voters
and tried to outdo each other in assailing Donald J. Trump.
Mrs.
Clinton, bruised by her surprise loss in the Michigan primary a day
earlier, was on the attack throughout the debate as she sought to
undercut Mr. Sanders’s momentum before the next
round of primaries.
Aiming
her remarks at viewers watching on Univision, a Spanish-language
sponsor of the debate, Mrs. Clinton threw his past support for Fidel
Castro and President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua
in Mr. Sanders’s face and repeatedly criticized him for opposing a 2007
bill that would have created a path to citizenship for millions of
immigrants in the country illegally.
“We
had Republican support,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We had a president willing
to sign it. I voted for that bill. Senator Sanders voted against it.”
She
refused to let up when Mr. Sanders explained that he thought the guest
worker provisions in the bill were “akin to slavery.” Mrs. Clinton
argued that she, Senator Edward M. Kennedy and
Hispanic groups would never have supported such a bill. Her broadsides
finally became too much for Mr. Sanders when she accused him of
supporting “vigilantes known as Minutemen” on the border.
“No,
I do not support vigilantes — that is a horrific statement, an unfair
statement to make,” Mr. Sanders said. “Madam Secretary, I will match my
record against yours any day of the week.”
In
their final debate before primaries in Florida, Ohio and other states
on Tuesday, the two Democrats were a study in contrasts as they made
stark appeals to the demographic groups they
have come to prize.
Mrs.
Clinton repeatedly aligned herself with the needs and concerns of
immigrant families and stuck to her promise to “knock down barriers” in
employment and housing, hoping these priorities
would inspire Hispanics and African-Americans and deliver her landslide
victories in Florida and North Carolina.
Mr.
Sanders’s rallying cries against the “rigged economy” and
“establishment politics” were aimed at liberals, young people,
working-class white voters and independents who could be decisive
for him in Ohio, Illinois and Missouri, his top targets next week.
He
appeared confident to the point of cocky at times, claiming at one
point that Mrs. Clinton had borrowed from his proposals to make public
colleges free. “Thank you for copying a very good
idea,” he said. He chortled when Mrs. Clinton accused him of not
supporting clean energy ideas, and he muttered, “Come on,” when Mrs.
Clinton refused to stop speaking.
He
also showed he could throw a punch, such as when Mrs. Clinton
questioned the cost of his Medicare-for-all plan, saying, “If it sounds
too good to be true, it probably is.”
“What
Secretary Clinton is saying is that the United States should continue
to be the only major country on earth that doesn’t guarantee health care
to all of our people,” Mr. Sanders said,
drawing a stern look from his opponent.
“I do believe in universal coverage,” she fired back. “Remember, I fought for it 25 years ago.”
The
debate in Miami came just three days after the candidates’ last
face-off in Flint, Mich., and one day after Mr. Sanders was declared the
winner of that state’s primary. His unexpected
victory infused his campaign with excitement and fund-raising momentum:
He was on track to raise $5 million in online donations in the ensuing
24 hours.
Mr. Sanders’s success in Michigan seemed to energize him Wednesday in countering Mrs. Clinton’s attacks on immigration.
“Secretary
Clinton prevailed upon the governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, who
wanted to do the right thing and provide driver’s licenses to those who
were undocumented,” Mr. Sanders said.
“She said, ‘Don’t do it,’ and New York State still does not do it.” He
also noted that he had supported allowing children from war-torn Central
American countries to enter the United States and asserted that Mrs.
Clinton’s view was “send them back.”
“That
is something that is not fair about what I said,” Mrs. Clinton said. “I
did say we needed to be very concerned about little children coming to
this country on their own, very often,
many of them not making it, and when they got here, they needed, as I
have argued for, legal counsel, due process, to make a decision.”
Both
candidates, who consistently praise President Obama on most issues,
vowed to end the mass deportations of his administration. They both
flatly promised not to deport children.
Mrs.
Clinton projected steeliness throughout the debate and did not seem
fazed by her loss in Michigan, taking comfort in her accumulation of
more of the delegates needed to win the Democratic
nomination. She has a steadily growing delegate lead over Mr. Sanders
in spite of his successes, because her margins of victory have been
greater.
Yet
she was careful to show that she was not taking the nomination for
granted, even pushing back against a question about whether she had
gotten ahead of herself in assuming she had all
but beaten Mr. Sanders.
“I’m
continuing to work hard for every single vote across our country,” Mrs.
Clinton said. “I was pleased that I got 100,000 more votes last night
than my opponent, and more delegates.”
Each candidate sought to be perceived as the more formidable challenger to Mr. Trump, the Republican front-runner.
Mrs.
Clinton argued that Mr. Trump was promoting “un-American views” and
promised to “take every opportunity to criticize” him. Later, she mocked
his centerpiece proposal to build “a very
tall wall, right, a beautiful, tall wall.”
Mr.
Sanders argued that he could convince Democratic Party leaders and
elected officials that “Bernie Sanders is the strongest candidate to
defeat Donald Trump.”
But
Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders both sidestepped a direct question about
whether they thought Mr. Trump was a racist, given his hostile comments
about Mexicans and Muslims and his initial
reluctance to disavow the support of the former Ku Klux Klan leader
David Duke.
Mr.
Sanders said he was confident that Americans would not elect Mr. Trump,
and pointed out that Mr. Trump had been a leading skeptic of whether
Mr. Obama was born in the United States and
eligible to be president. Mr. Sanders noted that no one had challenged
him over the fact that his own father was born in Poland.
“Nobody has ever asked me for my birth certificate,” Mr. Sanders said. “Maybe that has to do with the color of my skin.”
Both
Democrats saw the debate as an opportunity to reach Latino voters not
only in Florida, but also in Arizona, California, Illinois and other
states with large Hispanic populations.
Asked
whether he stood by his positive statements in the past about Mr.
Castro and Mr. Ortega, Mr. Sanders sought to put the remarks in context
but did not disavow them. Mrs. Clinton pounced.
“I
just couldn’t disagree more,” she said. “If the values are that you
oppress people, you disappear people, you imprison people, even kill
people for expressing their opinions, for expressing
freedom of speech, that is not the kind of revolution of values that I
ever want to see anywhere.”
Mrs.
Clinton was introspective when asked why many Americans do not trust
her. “Obviously, it’s painful for me to hear that,” she said. “I am not a
natural politician, in case you haven’t
noticed, like my husband or President Obama,” she added. “I just have
to do the best I can” and “hope that people see that I am fighting for
them.”
Many
of the questions to Mrs. Clinton were provocatively worded, especially
those from Jorge Ramos of Univision. After playing a video in which the
mother of an American killed in Benghazi,
Libya, questioned whether Mrs. Clinton had told the truth about the
attacks there, Mr. Ramos bluntly asked: “Did you lie to them?”
Mrs.
Clinton was taken aback. “She’s wrong. She’s absolutely wrong,” she
said. “When we had information we made it public, but then sometimes we
had to go back and say, we have new information
that contradicts it.”
Mr.
Ramos also pressed Mrs. Clinton on whether she would drop out of the
race if she were indicted on charges related to her use of a private
email server as secretary of state. At first
she ignored the question, but when the moderators followed up, she
dismissed it curtly.
“Oh, for goodness — that is not going to happen,” she said. “I am not even answering that question.”
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