Clinton vs. Sanders: 3 Issues to Watch in the Democratic Debate
With the first Democratic debate coming up Tuesday evening, let’s examine the policy issues that divide the party’s frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, from the unlikely figure who’s emerged as her chief rival, Vermont’s “democratic socialist” senator, Bernie Sanders.
On many issues Sanders and Clinton agree only recently.
Tacking to the left in the past month, Clinton is now on Sanders’ side opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement that President Obama has championed to expand trade with Asia. Clinton is also now against to the Keystone XL pipeline that would carry filthy Canadian tar-sands crude to the global export market via the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Clinton’s opposition to both of these projects is, in part, a repudiation of her own legacy as secretary of state. Clinton set in motion the initial federal review of Keystone that found it would have little impact on carbon emissions, and positioned herself as a TPP cheerleader, hailing it as the “gold standard” of free-trade agreements in 2012.
On other big issues, Clinton and Sanders have been on the same page from the start. Both launched their campaigns vowing that opposition to Citizens United — the Supreme Court decision that opened the floodgates for unlimited corporate money in our elections — would be a litmus test for future nominees to the nation’s high court. Both candidates are also staunch advocates of reproductive freedom. Sanders even took to the stage at the Christian Liberty University to defend abortion and the rights of women who “don’t want the government telling them what they have to do.”
But key differences remain, on issues of health care, wages, education and more.
Many of these are not disagreements of orientation but degree. That is to say both candidates identify the same policy problem, but they seek to solve it differently. Consider the minimum wage: Sanders advocates a $15-an-hour national standard to ensure full-time workers are not living in poverty. Clinton supports a higher minimum wage, but has cautioned “what you can do in LA or in New York may not work in other places.”
In nearly every case, Sanders’ political solution goes bigger — and often at a greater cost. (Sanders is proposing $6.5 trillion in new taxes; Clinton has yet to release a comprehensive tax plan.)
The two candidates have largely avoided directly confronting one another on the campaign trail. But here are three key policy differences that could set sparks flying on the debate stage in Las Vegas Tuesday night.
Gun control
This is one arena in which Clinton has outflanked Sanders as the more progressive candidate.
Sanders:
Hailing from largely rural Vermont, Sanders is a gun-state progressive, and has voted as such, even opposing the Brady Bill of 1993 because of the law’s waiting period. Sanders says he’s just representing his constituents. “I think that urban America has got to respect what rural America is about,” he told NPR in June. Most damaging to his cred among gun control activists, Sanders voted for the NRA-backed 2005 bill that gave gun manufacturers blanket immunity from consumer lawsuits — the kind that hobbled Big Tobacco beginning in the Nineties. In the wake of the Oregon massacre, Sanders called for an end to the gunshow loophole (buyers at gun shows are currently exempt from background checks) and declared, “We must ban semi-automatic assault weapons which are designed strictly for killing human beings.”