Clinton and Sanders tussle over ISIS, Wall Street ties

There were plenty of heated exchanges at Saturday night’s Democratic presidential debate as Bernie Sanders sought to cut into front-runner Hillary Clinton’s lead, but there was no game-changing moment less than six weeks before the Iowa caucuses.

The two leading Democratic candidates looked to differentiate themselves on issues including foreign policy and economics during the contest at St. Anselm University in Manchester, N.H. Sanders, a senator from Vermont, tried to outflank Clinton on the left while Clinton sought to assert her experience.

The biggest source of disagreement onstage was over Clinton’s role as secretary of State in the ouster of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in 2011.

{mosads}”I worry too much that Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change and a little bit too aggressive without knowing what the intended consequences might be,” he said. 

“Yes, we could get rid of Saddam Hussein, but that destabilized the entire region. Yes, we could get rid of Gaddafi, a terrible dictator, but that created a vacuum for ISIS.”  

But Clinton hit back, noting that Sanders voted for a measure in the Senate that called for regime change in Libya. 

“All of these are very difficult issues, I know that, I’ve been dealing with them for a long time,” she said. 

“If we had not joined with our European partners and our Arab partners to assist the people in Libya, you would be looking at Syria.” 

Former Maryland Gov. O’Malley, fighting for attention on the stage and traction in the race, used the opportunity to launch a jab at his rivals’ age as well pan what he portrayed as old-school ways of thinking. 

“May I offer a different generation’s perspective on this?” the 52-year-old said to a mix of jeers and some boos from the audience after Sanders, 74, and Clinton, 68, sparred over the merits of regime change. 

“During the Cold War, we got into a bad habit of always looking to see who was wearing the jersey of the communists and who was wearing the U.S. jersey,” he said. 

“We need to leave the Cold War behind us and we need to put together new alliances.”

But while it went over during the debate without much pushback, Clinton may have set up a future attack from GOP rivals when she lauded the president’s plan to combat terrorists from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). 

“We now finally are where we need to be. We have a strategy and a commitment to go after ISIS, which is a danger to us as well as the region and we finally have a U.N. Security Council resolution bringing the world together to go after a political transition in Syria,” she said. 

“If the United States does not lead, there is not another leader, there is a vacuum, and we have to lead if we’re going to be successful.”

Both the Republican National Committee and the Republican super-PAC America Rising emailed the comment to reporters criticizing the idea that America is “where we need to be” in the fight against ISIS and previewing a likely general election attack.

The candidates also tried to show their differences on economics, with Sanders using a Clinton joke to hit back at her for what he sees as ties to Wall Street. 

When asked whether corporate America would love her, Clinton remarked with a smile, “Everyone should.” 

But Sanders immediately hit back when asked the same question about himself. 

“No I think they won’t,” he said. 

“Hillary and I have a difference. CEOs of large multinationals may like Hillary, they ain’t gonna like me, and Wall Street is going to like me even less.”

The Sanders campaign sent out a fundraising email highlighting this exchange almost as soon as the debate was over.

But Clinton took Sanders to task on his expansions of social programs, which she framed as ballooning the size of government with no regard for costs and tax increases.  

“It’s been estimated that we are looking at 18 to $20 million, about a 40 percent increase of the federal budget,” she said. 

“I think we’ve got to be really thoughtful about how we are going to afford what we propose which is why everything that I have proposed I will tell you exactly how I will pay for it.” 

Clinton promised not to raise taxes on families making less than $250,000, a promise aimed at a general election audience and the swing voters who could might be convinced to vote for a Democrat.

Sanders chose not to make that call, noting that many of country’s most important social programs including social security have been paid for by tax increases.  

The biggest story of the past 24 hours, the heated standoff between the Democratic National Committee and the Sanders campaign over revelations that Sanders campaign staff improperly obtained proprietary data from the Clinton campaign, was the big news at the opening of the debate but was not revisited by either the moderators or the candidates.

Sanders apologized and Clinton accepted, noting that the race should move on.