The aftermath of the terrorist atrocities in Paris failed to deter surprisingly intense policy clashes between the Democrat presidential rivals on Saturday, as Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley took up fiercely opposing positions not just on American foreign policy but also on the economy and gun control.
As a former secretary of state, Clinton was seen as a natural frontrunner going into a second television debate that had been hastily rearranged to focus on foreign policy and was expected to be heavily overshadowed by the attacks in France.
Yet despite their sombre and sympathetic tone in statements regarding events in France, the three candidates moved beyond platitudes and into passionate debate over the extent to which the US should intervene in the Middle East to prevent future attacks.
“Isis cannot just be contained – it must be defeated,” Clinton began, in veiled criticism of Barack Obama’s claim just before the attacks that Isis was contained in Syria and Iraq.
Sanders then recovered from a shaky start and began to carve out a distinctive foreign policy of his own – suggesting that Clinton’s record of interventionism was partly to blame for the current crisis.
“I would argue that the disastrous invasion of Iraq, something I strongly opposed, has unravelled the region completely … and led to the rise of Isis,” said the Vermont senator, who has previously spoken little on national security.
The Sanders campaign was accused of clashing beforehand with TV host CBS over the revised format of the debate – something its advisers denied – but Clinton nonetheless took advantage of her deep foreign policy experience to score points over him on the nuances of Middle East alliances and Russian tactical nuclear weapons.
Sanders was joined repeatedly by O’Malley, who enjoyed perhaps his best performance yet, as they paired potent rhetoric against the secretary’s more cautious eye for detail.
One of their angriest exchanges occurred over financial reform, as both Sanders and O’Malley sought to characterize Clinton as beholden to the interests of Wall Street.
Clinton was asked if her donations from Wall Street would affect her ability to regulate the financial industry. The Democratic frontrunner said she had laid out an “aggressive plan to rein in Wall Street” and pointed to Super Pacs established by hedge fund managers to fight her candidacy.
When the moderators turned to Sanders for an assessment of Clinton’s response, the senator had just three words: “Not good enough.”
“Why over her career has Wall Street been the major contributor to Hillary Clinton? Maybe they are dumb, but I don’t think so,” he said, in one of his most direct critiques to date of Clinton’s ties to Wall Street.
“Their business model is greed and fraud,” Sanders said. “And for the sake of our economy … the major banks must be broken up.”
Sanders’ indictment prompted a sharp response from Clinton, who said: “He has basically used his answer to impugn my integrity.”
She then pivoted to her small donations, 60% of which she said were from women – a response that was met with loud applause. Clinton also invoked the September 11 attacks and how she helped Manhattan rebuild while representing New York at the time in the US Senate.
The latter anecdote was raised further along in the debate, in a moment that captured the nature of modern-day elections. A tweet was read to Clinton – it asked what 9/11 had to do with accepting contributions from Wall Street.
O’Malley also went after Clinton’s financial record, dubbing her Wall Street reform plan “weak tea”. “I won’t be taking my orders from Wall Street,” he said.
Unlike after the first TV debate, when Clinton was judged to have pulled ahead of her opponents, the consensus among observers as well as campaign officials in the post-debate spin room in Des Moines was that all three candidates had performed better than expected on a tricky night to talk politics.
Tad Devine, a senior Sanders campaign adviser, defended his candidate’s decision to segue awkwardly from his opening statement on Paris back into his more traditional stump speech on US inequality.
“He understands the importance of foreign policy in terms of his capacity to be the commander-in-chief,” Devine told the Guardian. “But we have a message, and if you want to deliver a message in a big, gigantic country, you have got to make sure it is heard by talking about it all the time.
“The message of the Bernie Sanders campaign is simple: America has a rigged economy that sends all the wealth to the top and it’s held in place by a corrupt system of campaign finance, and that’s what you are going to be hearing from him.”
Clinton advisers were unrepentant about what many viewed as her biggest slip of the night: a clumsy defence of her ties to Wall Street by referring to the need to help lower Manhattan recover from the 9/11 attacks.
“So I represented New York. I represented New York on 9/11 when we were attacked. Where were we attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan, where Wall Street is,” said Clinton, in comments that were criticised on social media for being exploitative.
But the Clinton camp claimed it was the other two candidates who chose to exploit personal differences with the frontrunner rather than discuss their own agendas.
“It was aggressive,” communications director Jennifer Palmieri told reporters afterwards. “The other candidates came to talk about her more than they came to talk about what they would do.”
Clinton nonetheless repeated her attack on Sanders for his mixed record on gun control, contrasting her willingness to apologise for her mistaken vote for the Iraq war with his equivocation over past support for certain gun rights.
Perhaps the most improved performance came from O’Malley, who drew the biggest applause of the night for attacking Donald Trump as an “anti-immigrant circus barker” and also provoked laughter when complaining about the cost of his children’s college education.
But Clinton sought to distance herself from the populism of her two rivals, seeking to portray herself as a more nuanced but practical politician who was willing to see complexity where they saw simplicity.
“I have nothing against the passion of my colleagues,” said Clinton. “I just don’t think it would get the job done.”
