Hillary Clinton arrived in this liberal New England enclave with a message for anyone thinking about voting for Sen. Bernie Sanders of next-door Vermont: “I take a backseat to no one when you look at my record in standing up and fighting for progressive values.”
Sanders, according to the latest New Hampshire polls, is trailing Clinton by just eight points. And at the first stop of her two-day swing through the early-voting state, Clinton highlighted contrasts with her main Democratic rival without mentioning him by name.
Politico changed her line about “progressive values” to “liberal record” for the headline. It’s important that the MSM keeps up the illusion that Democrats aren’t all extreme leftists. Bernie Sanders is refreshing in that he at least admits he’s running around on the socialist fringe, the rest of the Democrats have to at least pretend they don’t hate the Constitution.
For the moment anyway.
What makes this interesting is that the imperious presumptive runaway nominee is being forced to react to another candidate. This probably isn’t something that her team has workshopped a lot. If they have in the past, you can bet they weren’t thinking it would be Bernie Sanders forcing their hand.
The openly progressive constituency in the Democratic Party is restless, feeling that they’ve been shortchanged by the current occupant of the White House who, as many of us tried to tell them, is just in it for himself. The wing of the party that’s voting for Hillary is doing it because they feel they have to-she really doesn’t get anyone fired up. If Sanders keeps gaining momentum, it could create an opportunity for the progressive that everyone on the Left really wants to see get in the race. The Warren money may have shifted to Sanders recently but they’ll ditch him in a heartbeat if Fauxcahontas jumps in.
And then we will have something entertaining to watch.
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