Bill Clinton Gives New Hampshire a Preview of What Comes Next

<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/hieronymus/2388257905/in/photolist-4D3rSr-np4rRU-5K9jna-66Gk8c-7R5JQe-aBCYcU-4f4Qey-4DVJsV-D3TFBa-D1zzeu-CVAJZ4-hGVbSm-9irrQT-aFSzuT-ePm2Ei-ePxrtf-hDCf4n-hDCtBV-5gD1Q5-6CzEr-6MaqyT-ePuWh5-Ca4Fur-5K9fPD-5KdAk9-jBwah-CE1Kog-DdvRzR-CE1LgP-D3WVrq-Cg8i88-CE1L4z-CE1KRR-DdvSnn-CE1KCz-6DNpj8-63MyLY-6nTPQ6-5KdB3U-y79rCP-578yRB-CE1KWk-D6eca4-CE1KAv-CE1Lep-D3WW2U-CE1KfF-BT1aGT-CLoKLw-DdvRVa">Justin Ruckman</a>/Flickr

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


On Sunday, former President Bill Clinton showed Bernie Sanders what happens when the big dog gets off the porch.

With Hillary Clinton in Flint, Michigan, to meet with the mayor about the city’s water crisis, the former president had the state to himself, and he gave the Vermont senator a piece of his mind. He mocked Sanders as unrooted from reality, joking, “When you’re making a ‘revolution,’ you can’t be too careful with the facts.” Clinton referred to Sanders as “hermetically sealed.” He called Bernie’s supporters “sexist” and “profane” (a nod to the so-called “Bernie Bro” phenomenon) and reprised the mostly forgotten December scandal over Sanders’ campaign accessing Clinton’s voter data (for which Sanders apologized). “‘I tried to loot information from the other guy’s computer and I raised a million dollars out of it,'” Clinton said, offering his guess at what was going through Sanders’ mind.

It was the most direct personal attack from either candidate’s campaign this election cycle, two days before the primary. And by the next day, Bill Clinton appeared to have shaken the whole thing off. On Monday night in Hudson, joined by his daughter, Chelsea, a smattering of New Hampshire elected officials, Massachusetts Rep. Joseph Kennedy III, and Ted Danson (!), the former president offered a more subdued critique of the Vermont senator. Referring to his wife, he began his remarks by saying, “Sometimes when we’re on a stage like this, I wish we weren’t married, so I could say what I really want to say—and I don’t mean that in a negative way.” What he meant was that he had to self-censor his riffs for the good of the campaign. (Not that it has stopped him in the past.)

Instead, he offered an olive branch, or something like it, to the Sanders supporters he’d broadly characterized as “vicious” trolls on Sunday. “A lot of the young millennials think they’ll never move out of their parents’ house, never get a job that’s worth having, never be able to change,” Clinton said, before channeling a bit of Sanders’ own stump speech. “If they want to start a small business they won’t be able to get a loan. I get why a lot of people are mad. I get how frustrating it is, when most of the gains have gone to the top 1 percent, and 90 percent of them since I left office have gone to the top 10 percent. I get why people are upset when they hear the president tell the truth—the absolute truth—[that] we are the best-positioned country for the 21st-century, our economy is up over all the other big economies, but 84 percent of the people have not gotten a raise…I get it.”

“The question is, what are you gonna do about it?” he continued. “And the one thing I really appreciate about New Hampshire is that here finally the dam broke in the polarization of the campaign and we actually began to be free to discuss who’s got the better ideas.”

Clinton, though, couldn’t help getting taking another shot at Sanders’ frequent invocations of the “establishment,” suggesting that such a label unnecessarily tarred politicians who had put their careers on the line to vote for Obamacare, such as former Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor. (“Establishment” is a nebulous term, but Pryor, the son of former Arkansas governor and senator David Pryor, surely fits most definitions of it.)

There’s an interesting dynamic between Hillary Clinton and Sanders that, if you go to a few events, you can pick up on. When Clinton takes the stage, she’s following a group of well-known Democratic politicians or activists—Al Franken, Jeanne Shaheen, Lena Dunham, Bubba. When Bernie takes the stage, often enough it’s just Bernie. And that’s fine; he’s leading in New Hampshire, something practically no one saw coming last spring. But in a fight like the one the Democratic primary is careening toward if Sanders wins big on Tuesday, it’s good to have someone in your corner who can draw some blood. And Bill Clinton sounds like he’s relishing a fight.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate