A high-energy Senator Bernie Sanders announced at the MSNBC/Telemundo town hall on Thursday night that he “looks forward to winning the nomination”; a pumped-up Clinton said she looks forward to “winning it quickly”.
But though both seemed supremely confident about their chances, particularly at Saturday’s caucuses in Nevada, the way they voiced their assuredness underscored exactly what they need: for Sanders it’s his last best chance to show that Clinton’s once-certain lock on non-white voters is coming undone and he can win in the long haul; for Clinton, it’s to stop Sanders’ surge as soon as possible – even on Saturday.
But for attendees on Thursday, the weekend is a long way off, and many claimed to still be undecided. So they came with detailed policy questions informed by their own life experiences: questions about affordable childcare, about raising the retirement age and even a detailed query about whether the candidate’s debt-free college plan would apply in equal measure to people on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), a policy most Americans couldn’t explain if they tried. (It is, notably, Barack Obama’s program to allow undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children and graduated from high school to remain without fear of deportation.)
But candidates were also called upon respectively to answer to their perceived weaknesses. For Sanders that meant questions about race and gender while Clinton faced familiar queries about trustworthiness. And both candidates continued to be themselves, for better or for worse.
Sanders, who was criticized early on in the campaign for ignoring the implications of race and gender to focus on solutions for income inequality, went on to do exactly that during his portion of the town hall.
When asked if he identifies as a feminist, for instance, he said that he considers himself “a strong feminist” before quickly pivoting to economics: women make 79 cents on the dollar to men and minority women make considerably less, he noted. He did the same thing when asked about affordable childcare, tying it back to his larger message of economic inequality by noting that Republicans want to protect the richest Americans from higher taxes while he would use it to pay for things like affordable childcare. Then he went on to object to the paltry compensation elementary-level educators and caretakers receive.
Another typical Sanders faux pas came when he interrupted a young woman asking him a question on college affordability. She interrupted the beginning of his answer by saying: “Wait, I’m not finished.” It’s not a good look for anyone to interrupt a woman asking a question at a town hall and least of all for Sanders, who’s known for his propensity to shout in debates, something Clinton – it’s been widely observed – doesn’t do, and likely couldn’t get away with doing.
Clinton, for her part, was dinged by a self-identified Sanders supporter for not releasing transcripts of her paid speeches to big donors. That’s code, particularly coming from a Sanders supporter, for the notion that Clinton is “untrustworthy”. Sanders supporters have gone to great lengths to highlight that alleged perception in other town halls – and it’s a narrative on which no one in the media can resist remarking (including me).
A millennial later asked Clinton – in a question categorized by moderator Chuck Todd as being about distrust – about what’s widely seen as Sanders’ strength and her weakness: “My generation is a little wary of placing another politician in the White House.”
Never mind that anyone running for president is, by definition, a politician – including Bernie Sanders, who was first elected to office in 1981, whereas Clinton didn’t even run for office until the year 2000. And never mind that women in power are more likely to be perceived as untrustworthy simply by virtue of the fact that they are women.
It was a ridiculous question, but that doesn’t entirely excuse Clinton’s tone-deaf answer, which was, in part, to praise the record of her husband: “I want to get back to the kind of job creation we had when my husband was president.”
Got that kids? If you’re worried about Clinton being such a through-and-through politician, please recall the Clinton dynasty!
On the whole though, that skeptical millennial asking about Clinton’s background as “a politician” (the horror!) probably made it easier for Clinton to begin to dismiss the so-called trust questions.
After Clinton gave her response, Todd asked to to explain how she feels about having to answer such questions. Clinton, however, was prepared to explain the real concern behind such questions. They “come down to this young woman’s question” Clinton said, “which was: we’ve seen her face for a long time: what does that mean?”
And just like that, she had an excuse to trumpet her experience – as a politician, sure, but also as a stateswoman, a lawyer and all the other roles she’s held.
The candidates may fully embody their own weaknesses – Sanders can’t stop turning everything into an income inequality question, and Clinton will always have to answer for the caricature the Republicans made of her in the 90s – but they’re remarkably good at showing how those weaknesses can also be strengths, if the voters will just see them that way.
