Hillary’s Debt to Sanders and Trump Next to her rivals’ gloomy rhetoric about America the bleak, she almost looks like a beacon of hope. Dorothy Rabinowitz
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillarys-debt-to-sanders-and-trump-1461710649
Even before the air-clearing April 19 New York primary in which Bernie Sanders was trounced and Donald Trump was a big winner, word had come of a more presidential Trump soon to be revealed. The unveiling came with Mr. Trump’s victory speech, an event that occasioned near-universal excitement when the candidate used the word “senator” in front of Ted Cruz’s name—a reaction that said a good deal about Mr. Trump and his campaign, all of it deeply familiar.
Mr. Trump’s image refurbishing promises to become a show all its own, fascinating to behold, albeit with slim prospects of success. The same would be true for Bernie Sanders, also being pressed now to improve his tone—the nudging being another of the many things the two have in common in addition to the main thing, namely the enormous role both have played in advancing Hillary Clinton’s progress toward the White House.
Mr. Sanders is being urged, in the interest of Democratic unity, to temper his assaults on Hillary Clinton as a pawn of Wall Street and servant of special interests—no easy matter for a lifelong ideologue of the far left. But no accusation transmits more of a sense of high moral indignation than the regular reminders that Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq war in 2002 and that he did not—a fact Mr. Sanders cites, by way of response, when facing questions about his qualifications for the presidency as compared with those of Mrs. Clinton.
To hear him again and again on Sen. Clinton’s war vote is to be struck by the unvarying intensity Mr. Sanders brings to the charge, the tone of a man delivering a bombshell, and one, for him, that never loses its power. His capacity to stay on message to the exclusion of all other concerns has been conspicuous throughout his campaign.
When news came in November that the topics for the Des Moines, Iowa, debate among the Democratic contenders would be reordered to include national security and terrorism, no one was taken aback. No one that is but the Sanders campaign, which made bitter protest to CBS, the debate host, over this sudden change in the agreed-on lineup of subjects. CONTINUE AT SITE
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