"Hillary Clinton has taken off the "straitjacket" she says she was forced into during the 2016 Democratic primary."
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Hillary Clinton is going after Bernie Sanders harder than ever before — and it could hurt Democrats in 2020
Eliza Relman
Sep 16th 2017 2:55PM
Hillary Clinton has taken off the "straitjacket" she says she was forced into during the 2016 Democratic primary.
In her new campaign memoir, the former presidential candidate wasn't exactly subtle about her disapproval of Sen. Bernie Sanders' campaign against her for the Democratic presidential nomination, writing that Sanders, a Vermont independent, caused her "lasting damage," deepened divisions among progressives, and "pav[ed] the way for then candidate Donald Trump's 'Crooked Hillary' campaign."
While many, including Sanders, dismissed Clinton's criticism as an irritating re-hashing of a now-irrelevant battle, the divisions between Clinton's centrist wing of the Democratic Party and Sanders' more progressive (or more populist) supporters couldhave implications for Democrats in the 2018 midterms and even the 2020 presidential election.
'Purity tests'The day after Clinton released her book, Sanders unveiled his much-anticipated single-payer healthcare plan. Short on details and ambitious in its vision, the proposal won the endorsement of 15 top Democrats, many of them likely 2020 presidential candidates.
But other party leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, distanced themselves from the plan.
"We want to move the issue forward," Schumer said, adding that "there are are many different bills out there," including "many good ones" that he and other Democrats are examining.
Pelosi warned that support for a single-payer system shouldn't become a "litmus test" for Democrats.
In an interview on the liberal podcast "Pod Save America," Clinton said that while she supports the proposal as a "political statement," she doubts it's much more than a pipe dream at this point.
She also criticized the plan's lack of particulars in an interview with Vox.
"I don't know what the particulars are," Clinton told Vox. "As you might remember, during the campaign he introduced a single-payer bill every year he was in Congress — and when somebody finally read it, he couldn't explain it and couldn't really tell people how much it was going to cost." |
