The Democratic primary race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders has been about as bland as you might expect for a race between a couple of white senior citizens who have spent their entire lives in politics—especially when compared to the nuclear clownpocalypse on the Republican side.
In the last few days, however, the Clinton-Sanders race has started to get (somewhat) interesting as the candidates duke it out ahead of next week’s primary in New York, the state where Sanders was born and where Hillary served one and one-third terms as a carpetbagging senator.
The candidates have starting questioning each other’s qualifications to be president. Hillary suggested that Sanders “obviously hadn’t really studied or understood” key issues after the Vermont senator sat for a widely disparaged interview with the New York Daily News.
Sanders fired back at Clinton during a campaign rally on Wednesday, saying “people might wonder” about the “qualifications” of a candidate who voted for the Iraq War, supported controversial trade agreements, and took millions of dollars from special interests.
Clinton dismissed Sanders’s comments as “kind of a silly thing to say.” She also mocked Sanders for suggesting in the Daily News interview that the New York subway still runs on “tokens,” but proceeded to embarrassed herself when she struggled to use the subway on Thursday.
Some of Clinton supporters, on the other hand, were terribly offended by Sanders’s suggestion that Hillary is unqualified for the presidency, implying that it was an attack on women. This led to some Twitter sniping among liberal journalists.
Right on cue, New York Times columnist jumped into the fray with a scathing anti-Bernie column that echoed many of the talking points circulated by the Clinton campaign. Sanders’s recent statements regarding Clinton’s qualifications raised “serious character and values issues,” Paul Krugman wrote, and suggested that the candidate was beginning to echo the “petulant self-righteousness” of his most obnoxious supporters—the so-called Bernie Bros.
Tensions between the two camps are unlikely to ease any time soon. Sanders continues to rake in cash from his supporters, making it unlikely that he’ll quit the race any time soon. Meanwhile, recent polling shows Bernie gaining on Clinton in New York, and virtually tied on the national level.
The Washington Times reports that the battle over so-called superdelegates on the Democratic side is starting to get nasty, with Sanders backers threatening pledged Clinton supporters with abusive emails and phone calls.
As many have pointed out, the candidates’ sniping about “qualifications” brings back memories of the 2008 Democratic primary, when Hillary aggressively attacked Barack Obama as an amateur whose sole qualification was “a speech he gave in 2002.”