A truce between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton? Not so fast.
Reporting from Scranton, Pa. — A different Bernie Sanders — or at least a different Bernie Sanders message — showed up in Scranton, Pa., on Thursday as he resumed campaigning after his New York primary loss.
In an hourlong rally, there was no mention of Hillary Clinton’s top-dollar speeches to Wall Street, no demands that she release transcripts of them, no mockery about how, to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, those speeches must be Shakespearean in quality.
There was no mention of the $15 million raised by super PACs working for her from Wall Street employees, or the $25 million her supporters raised from special interests, gibes that have been common in his speeches in recent weeks.
Was it proof of a truce between the Democratic presidential candidates?
Not so fast. A few hours later, at an appearance in Reading, Pa., Sanders was back to criticizing Clinton’s campaign money, the super PAC fundraising and the Wall Street speeches.
“Not a bad day’s work,” he said sarcastically, proceeding with a set piece in which he pretends to release transcripts of his speeches to Wall Street — speeches that never occurred.
Earlier in the day, a truce of sorts seemed to be holding between Clinton and Sanders. Democrats have increasingly demanded that, fearful that the antagonistic primary race was hurting the chances of the eventual nominee. The party’s most probable choice is Clinton, who holds a large delegate lead over the Vermont senator.
On Wednesday, in her first campaign appearance in Pennsylvania after the New York results, Clinton made only a slight mention of Sanders, on the subject of gun control measures she has supported and he had opposed.
In Scranton, Sanders appeared to respond in kind. He went on for 26 minutes without mentioning the former secretary of State.
Over the last half of his speech, he noted several areas in which he and Clinton disagree — over the minimum wage, trade agreements, fracking and lifting the income cap to better fund Social Security. But his comparisons were of the just-the-facts variety.
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“I opposed all these trade agreements. Secretary Clinton supported most of them; that is a big difference,” he said.
He did hold a grudge of sorts against New York, complaining about the fact that only Democrats were allowed to vote in New York’s Democratic primary. He said that rule disenfranchised independent voters.
“We just had a Democratic primary in New York state,” he said, prompting boos from the crowd. “Well, I share those sentiments, but here’s the point: I don’t mind losing, but 3 million people who registered as independents did not have the right to participate. That really is not democracy.”
Changes of tone are a given in political campaigns, and particularly in this riotous one.
Republican candidate Donald Trump took the high road Tuesday night, calling Texas Sen. Ted Cruz by his honorific, but by Wednesday morning, he was back to castigating him as “Lyin’ Ted.”
But Trump and Cruz are in a ferocious battle that likely will not end until the July national convention in Cleveland.
Clinton’s better odds of clinching the Democratic nomination by the end of the primary season is what has led to calls for a calmer contest lest Democrats be handing Republicans their general election talking points. (Sanders’ team believes it still has a path to the nomination but acknowledges it’s more than likely to require superdelegates now supporting Clinton to flip to Sanders.)
In lieu of criticizing Clinton’s judgment and mocking her political alliances, Sanders had set out a different band of culprits: the “establishment” and Congress.
“The greed, recklessness and illegal behavior of Wall Street drove this country into the worst economic downturn in the modern history of this country, since the 1930s,” he said. “What did Congress do? They bailed them out. I didn’t vote for that, but that’s what Congress did.”
He made a pitch for his proposal to tax Wall Street speculation and use the money to finance his free tuition plan.
“This is not an idea the establishment feels all that comfortable with,” he said. “They might like the idea of bailing out Wall Street — that’s OK. But bailing out the middle class and helping their families, that is a terribly radical idea. I don’t think so!”
Sanders did offer generic slights at politicians who raise money from the wealthy — as most politicians do — but did not attach those complaints explicitly to Clinton, as he has in the past.
“The reason this campaign has been doing so well is we are listening to the people of this country, not just wealthy campaign contributors,” he said. “A lot of what American politics is about today is candidates running around, sitting in mansions of billionaires, listening to the terrifying problems the millionaires have.”
But by the time his next event ended, the criticisms of Clinton’s link to wealthy contributors — and the insinuation that she was part of a “corrupt” campaign finance system — was explicitly back in the mix.
Follow me on Twitter: @cathleendecker.
For more on politics, go to latimes.com/decker.
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