MILWAUKEE — Hillary Clinton, scrambling to recover from her double-digit defeat in the New Hampshire primary, repeatedly challenged the trillion-dollar policy plans of Bernie Sanders at their presidential debate on Thursday night and portrayed him as a big talker who needed to “level” with voters about the difficulty of accomplishing his agenda.
Foreign affairs also took on unusual prominence as Mrs. Clinton sought to underscore her experience and Mr. Sanders excoriated her judgment on Libya and Iraq, as well as her previous praise of former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger. But Mrs. Clinton was frequently on the offensive as well, seizing an opportunity to talk about leaders she admired and turning it against Mr. Sanders by bashing his past criticism of President Obama — a remark that Mr. Sanders called a “low blow.”
She is wagering that even voters excited by Mr. Sanders’s inspiring message will reconsider their support when they learn of his lack of experience in foreign policy and his vague explanations for how he will pay for his expansive government programs.
Mrs. Clinton pounced from the start, after Mr. Sanders demurred in saying how much his proposals would increase the size of the federal government. She stepped in and said that by economists’ estimates, the government would grow 40 percent under Mr. Sanders.
And rather than bashing him as she did at their debate last Thursday, she appeared to try to get under his skin by implying that he had not been transparent about the cost of his programs, such as his proposed expansion of government health care.
“This is not about math. This is about people’s lives, and we should level with the American people,” Mrs. Clinton said. She then repeated a jab at Mr. Sanders’s reputation as a truth-teller that she would return to during the debate: “You need to level with people about what they will have at the end of the process you are proposing. And based on every analysis that I can find by people who are sympathetic to the goal, the numbers don’t add up.”
“I don’t know what economists Secretary Clinton is talking to,” Mr. Sanders responded, insisting that families could come out with savings. “That is absolutely inaccurate.”
“The kind of criticism that we’ve heard from Senator Sanders about our president, I expect from Republicans,” she said. “I do not expect from someone running for the Democratic nomination.”
Mr. Sanders called the comment a “low blow” and said that while he disagreed with Mr. Obama on occasion in the Senate, the president was a friend.
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“One of us ran against Barack Obama,” he fired back at Mrs. Clinton. “I was not that candidate.”
The PBS debate, the sixth of the Democratic race but only the second to include just Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders, came at a moment of rising concern among Democrats about the strength of Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy and the electability of Mr. Sanders if he becomes the Democratic nominee. Mrs. Clinton fared poorly among key parts of the Democratic electorate in the New Hampshire primary, losing a majority of the women who voted, as well as young people, who expressed mistrust of her on the campaign trail. As for Mr. Sanders, some Democrats believe he is too liberal and his proposed tax increases too toxic to win a general election.
Mrs. Clinton’s pointed critique of Mr. Sanders was part of a new calculation by her campaign that the debate format, in which Mrs. Clinton excels, was the best way to draw attention to Mr. Sanders’s record and his minimal expertise in foreign policy. The role of commander in chief became another flash point on Thursday, when Mr. Sanders argued that his judgment was better than Mrs. Clinton’s, and more important than her experience. He criticized Mrs. Clinton’s 2002 vote to authorize the war in Iraq, her push to oust Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya and her consulting of Mr. Kissinger.
“I’m proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend,” Mr. Sanders said, saying Mr. Kissinger had enabled genocide in Cambodia under Pol Pot.
Mrs. Clinton turned the exchange back on Mr. Sanders, noting that he had sidestepped requests to identify his own foreign policy advisers.
“Well, it ain’t Henry Kissinger,” Mr. Sanders snapped back.
Mr. Sanders also criticized Mrs. Clinton for telling CNN in 2014 that the children who entered the United States from Central America should be sent back, a statement that made some young Latinos question her commitment to their communities.
“I made it very clear that those children needed to be processed appropriately,” Mrs. Clinton said. But she said the United States also had to send a message to parents “not to send their children on this dangerous journey in the hands of smugglers.”
“These are children,” Mr. Sanders said. “I don’t think we use them to send a message, I think we welcome them into this country.”
Mrs. Clinton, sensing her rival’s relative inexperience on world affairs, offered a somewhat belittling reply at one point in the exchange: “It’s a big, complicated world out there,” she said.ng the main story
Mr. Sanders also put Mrs. Clinton on the defensive over donations to the “super PAC” supporting her, saying that its $25 million haul included $15 million with some connection to Wall Street. Mrs. Clinton countered that she was not involved with the super PAC, but noted that Mr. Obama had also taken money from Wall Street. She rejected the idea that “if you take donations from Wall Street, you can’t be independent.”
“The people aren’t dumb,” Mr. Sanders replied. “Why in God’s name does Wall Street make huge campaign contributions? I guess just for the fun of it; they want to throw money around,” he added to applause.
Mrs. Clinton responded by repeating her plans to impose new regulations on hedge funds and other firms. Yet Mr. Sanders hit back again, invoking Theodore Roosevelt to argue that big banks had become too predatory against average Americans and needed to be broken up.
Throughout the debate, Mr. Sanders, who is seeking to appeal to racially diverse voters in Nevada and South Carolina, demonstrated little capacity to broaden his political message in compelling new directions beyond overhauling the economy, campaign finance and health care.
While he noted that his “Medicare for all” program would save the average middle-class family $5,000 a year, he did not present his vision in any new way or frame the issue in personal terms for average voters. His advisers said during the debate that his focus was on introducing himself to new voters around the country, who may be intrigued by his candidacy after days of news coverage about his huge win in New Hampshire.
At the same time, several of Mrs. Clinton’s answers reflected an urgent political imperative: to maintain and energize her deep support among minority voters in order to offset Mr. Sanders’s popularity with young people, liberals and some working-class white voters.
In her opening statement, Mrs. Clinton denounced discrimination against African-Americans in employment, education, housing and the criminal justice system. But she was matched by Mr. Sanders as he railed against a legal system in which young people have criminal records because of petty drug offenses while Wall Street executives escaped culpability for the great recession.
When asked whether he was potentially blocking a milestone for women by challenging Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Sanders, who would be the first Jewish president if elected, said, “I think a Sanders victory would be of some historical accomplishment as well.”
He also asserted that race relations would be better under a Sanders administration than they had been under Mr. Obama, the nation’s first black president.
“Absolutely,” Mr. Sanders said. “What we will do is say, instead of giving tax breaks to billionaires, we are going to create millions of jobs for low-income kids so they’re not hanging out on street corners.”
