Democratic presidential candidate HillaryClinton speaks at a
campaignevent at Valley SouthwoodsFreshman High School on January24,
2016 in West DesMoines, Iowa. PHOTO | AFP
In Summary
- Bernie Sanders has repeatedly attacked Hillary Clinton over what he says are her close ties to some big banks and Wall Street.
- Mr Sanders is a self-proclaimed democratic socialist who has put taking down the financial elite and Wall Street at the heart of his campaign.
- Hillary Clinton enjoys a wide advantage over Sanders on a nationwide basis, although they are neck-to-neck in some opinion polls.
NORTH LIBERTY, Iowa, Monday
Democratic
presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton on Sunday urged Iowa voters to
choose her experience over the idealism of rival Bernie Sanders, who
made the rounds of university campuses at the weekend to earn student
support.
“I know some of you are
still shopping. I’d like to shop too. I hope during the course of this
afternoon to convince some of you,” Clinton told about 600 people packed
into an elementary school gym in the town of North Liberty.
On
February 1, voters in Iowa, in the US heartland, will cast the first
ballots in the US presidential nominations process — a long road to
Election Day on November 8.
Clinton,
the 68-year-old former secretary of state, and Sanders, a 74-year-old
senator from Vermont, are running neck-and-neck in some opinion polls,
though Clinton enjoys a wide advantage on a nationwide basis.
‘She never wavers’
“As
secretary of state, she stared down some of the toughest dictators in
the world, and so I have no doubt that she can take on the Tea Party,
and the gun lobby,” said Cecile Richards, president of Planned
Parenthood, the influential US women’s health care provider.
“She never blinks, she never wavers.”
The
message Clinton and her team sought to drive home was that her
proposals are more realistic than those of Sanders, a self-proclaimed
democratic socialist who has put taking down the financial elite and
Wall Street at the heart of his campaign.
He
has repeatedly attacked Clinton over what he says are her close ties to
some big banks, and has chastised her for giving paid speeches to Wall
Street firms.
But Clinton fought back Sunday.
“I have taken on Wall Street for years!” she said. “I have a better plan to do it.”
“No bank is too big to fail, and no executive is too big to jail,” she added.
She
also insisted on her foreign policy bona fides and the “very specific
steps” she would take to defeat the Islamic State jihadist group.
OSAMA RAID
Clinton
devoted a long section of her stump speech to her role in the Osama bin
Laden raid in 2011, which several of President Barack Obama’s aides
considered to be too dangerous and risky. She said she encouraged Obama
to go ahead with it.
“The person who
sits in that (White House) situation room has to be able to weigh
intelligence and evidence to be able to really dig deep in these
details, and I offer you my experience and my judgment,” she said.
“We need to chart a steady course,” she concluded — suggesting that a Sanders administration would lack such stability.
Her
candidacy on Monday got the backing of The Boston Globe, a newspaper
with thousands of subscribers in New Hampshire, which follows Iowa next
month as balloting gets under way to choose the two major parties’
presidential nominees.
“This is Clinton’s time and the Globe enthusiastically endorses her,” the daily wrote.
Over the weekend, she got the endorsement of The Des Moines Register, Iowa’s largest circulation daily.
'POLITICAL REVOLUTION'
Still, Sanders’ idealism has charmed many Democratic voters.
In
a speech at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, Sanders
hammered home his call for a “political revolution,” recalling how at
first, he was deemed a “fringe candidate” — not a serious challenger to
Clinton.
“Well, my friends, a lot has happened in nine months,” he said.
In
an effort to assuage any doubts about voting for him in November,
Sanders offered up poll data suggesting he could beat Republican
frontrunner Donald Trump in the general election by a wider margin than
Clinton would.
“In a general
election, Republicans win when people are demoralized, when people do
not vote and the voter turnout is low,” he said. (AFP)
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