A fight that had been brewing between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders over whether Clinton was a true progressive spilled over to Wednesday’s CNN town hall.
Sanders renewed his attacks on Clinton’s claims that she was a progressive, targeting her ties to Wall Street, her vote for the Iraq War, her past stances on trade agreements and her waffling on the Keystone XL Pipeline.
“So I respect her, I thought she did a good job as secretary of state. I served with her in the Senate. We worked together on some issues,” Sanders said to CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “But there are other issues, Anderson, where I think she is just not progressive.”
“I do not know any progressive who has a super PAC and takes $15 million from Wall Street. That’s just not progressive,” Sanders continued.
He called her 2002 Senate vote approving the Iraq War a “key foreign policy vote of modern American history” on which she was wrong.
“The progressive community was pretty united in saying,’ Don’t listen to Bush. Don’t go to war,” Sanders said. “Secretary Clinton voted to go to war.”
He criticized her support of North American Free Trade Agreement.
“Reluctantly and after a lot of pressure on her, she came out against the [Trans-Pacific Partnership] and I’m glad that she did,” Sanders said.
He also knocked some of the things she said about the Keystone XL pipeline — which was ultimately blocked by the Obama administration — as proof she didn’t always take climate change seriously.
“For a long time, Secretary Clinton was talking about the benefits of the Keystone pipeline,” he said. “Well, there are no benefits to excavating and transporting some of the dirtiest fossil fuel in the world.”
Sanders had previously claimed that Clinton tried to be both a moderate and progressive, a criticism he was also asked at the town hall.
“Some of my best friends are moderates. I love moderates, but you can’t be a moderate and a progressive. They are different,” Sanders said.
Clinton had a chance to respond to his criticisms.
“I was somewhat amused today that Senator Sanders set himself up to be the gatekeeper,” she said, arguing that President Barack Obama, New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and late-Sen. Paul Wellstone would not have qualified as progressives by Sanders’ definition.
“So I’m not going to let that bother me. I know where I stand. I know who stands with me. I know what I’ve done,” Clinton said.
She also used the moment to attack statements made by Sanders last month suggesting the Human Rights Campaign and Planned Parenthood — groups that both endorsed Clinton — were part of the establishment.
“I don’t think it helps for the Senator to be making those kinds of comparisons because clearly we all share a lot of the same hopes and aspirations for our country that we want to see achieved,” she said.
