A
Democratic primary campaign in which both candidates prided themselves
on civility and debating the issues, rather than stooping to personal
attacks, took a fractious turn on Thursday. After Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont called Hillary Clinton
unqualified to be president, Democrats faced the prospect of an
increasingly contentious nominating process hurting the party’s ability
to unite against Republicans in the fall.
The
change in tenor signaled a pivotal moment for Mr. Sanders. He has won
six out of the last seven primary contests and could extend that streak
on Saturday in Wyoming, but he faces a tough challenge leading to the
April 19 primary in delegate-rich New York, his birthplace and Mrs.
Clinton’s adopted home.
Before
crowds of thousands, Mr. Sanders has effusively played up his momentum,
but privately his aides acknowledge a daunting mathematical reality: He
must play catch-up in New York. Mrs. Clinton leads by roughly 250
pledged delegates, and a map that had been friendly to Mr. Sanders will
shift back in her favor with primaries in New York, followed by
Pennsylvania on April 26.
Mrs.
Clinton’s partisans pointed to the attack on her credentials, which
polls show are one of her strongest assets as a candidate, as a
strategic misfire. Mr. Sanders’s aides called it an appropriately
forceful retaliation after suggestions by Mrs. Clinton and her allies
that he was unprepared to be president.
But
as Mr. Sanders fights to close the delegate gap, his comments sent a
shudder through party officials aligned with Mrs. Clinton. In her
campaign’s planning, April was meant to be a relatively calm month in
which to focus on raising money for a general election and honing a
message to use against the eventual Republican nominee. Mr. Sanders’s
staying power and online fund-raising prowess have instead caused her
campaign to spend heavily for advertising in expensive media markets.
But
an extended — and increasingly toxic — nomination fight, several
advisers said, could deplete Mrs. Clinton of resources and leave scars
that make it harder for her to unite his supporters behind her.
“Progressives
are going to have to come together in November to defeat whatever
crawls out of the G.O.P. circus in Cleveland,” said Jess McIntosh,
communications director at Emily’s List, a group that works to elect
women who support abortion rights and has endorsed Mrs. Clinton. “There
are a few attacks that make it harder to do that, and Bernie Sanders is
going there.”
And after appearing blindsided by New York politics this week, Mr. Sanders responded angrily.
In
an interview with The Daily News published Monday, he struggled to
elaborate on the details of some of his own policy proposals, including
those on Wall Street regulation. The Clinton campaign pounced, sending
the transcript to supporters, and Mrs. Clinton suggested to MSNBC on Wednesday that Mr. Sanders had not done his “homework” when it came to Wall Street regulation — his signature campaign issue.
Mr. Sanders was moved to retaliate, and he struck back harder than he had before. Seizing on a headline in The Washington Post — “Clinton Questions Whether Sanders is Qualified to be President” — Mr. Sanders turned the questioning around on her.
“She
has been saying lately that she thinks that I am, quote unquote, not
qualified to be president,” Mr. Sanders said at a rally in Philadelphia.
“I don’t believe that she is qualified if she is, through her ‘super PAC,’ taking tens of millions of dollars in special interest funds.”
He
added: “I don’t think you are qualified if you have voted for the
disastrous war in Iraq. I don’t think you are qualified if you supported
almost every disastrous trade agreement.”
Aides
to Mr. Sanders stuck by that line of attack, insisting Thursday that he
was merely defending himself, as any born-and-bred New Yorker should.
“Bernie,
really, was the guy who made this decision that he was not going to be
run over in the New York primary,” said Tad Devine, his senior
strategist. “It is a very tough, aggressive media environment, as anyone
who lives there understands, and we felt compelled to respond to her
charges and he did so.”
But
other Democrats interpreted Mr. Sanders’s shot at Mrs. Clinton — and a
suggestion by his campaign manager that Mrs. Clinton’s “ambitions to
become president” could “destroy the Democratic Party” — as an awkward attempt to regain ground after being battered by the Daily News interview.
“Bernie
and his team were off stride after the Daily News editorial interview
and took the bait, some of which was laid by the Clinton campaign,” said
David Axelrod, a former adviser to President Obama, who is not
supporting either candidate.
On Thursday night, Mr. Sanders told CBS News: “We should not get into this tit for tat. We should be debating the issues.”
Mr.
Sanders’s campaign hopes the show of forcefulness will convince
supporters that he is not ceding ground, and bolster its efforts to sway
delegates backing Mrs. Clinton to flip their support to him, as it
managed to at the Clark County convention in Nevada.
Calling
Mrs. Clinton unqualified struck some Democrats as a strategic misfire,
as more voters say she has the right experience for the job than say
that Mr. Sanders does. In a February Quinnipiac University poll, 64
percent of all registered voters and 93 percent of Democratic voters
said Mrs. Clinton had the right experience, compared with 54 percent and
75 percent for Mr. Sanders.
Even
he has said he would be comfortable with Mrs. Clinton as president. “I
would be most comfortable with me as president,” Mr. Sanders said in an
interview in January. “But if the choice is between right-wing
Republicans,” he said, Mrs. Clinton “is the far superior candidate.”
Asked
about Mr. Sanders’s attack on Thursday, Mrs. Clinton did not respond in
kind. “Well, it’s kind of a silly thing to say,” she told reporters on a
stop in the Bronx on Thursday. “But I’m going to trust the voters of
New York who know me and have voted for me three times.”
And in a halfhearted endorsement of Mr. Sanders’s qualifications, Mrs.
Clinton added that he was better than the Republicans running. “I don’t
know why he’s saying that, but I will take Bernie Sanders over Donald
Trump or Ted Cruz any time,” she said.
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