Today’s Hillary News & Views focuses on post-debate coverage, including updates from the campaign trail in Iowa on Sunday.
Des Moines Register has ten takeaways from Saturday night’s debate.
Here are a couple of highlights:
Clinton was the most full-throated she has been on college affordability.
She declared: "We should have debt-free college if you go to a public college or university." She often talks about debt-free tuition — but tuition is only part of the cost of college, advocates noted.
In her new TV ad launched last week, the on-screen text said: "Hillary's college compact: Go to college without debt." In the debate, she said it out loud herself. She wants to use federal Pell grants to defray living expenses, she said.
No one embraced Obama more than Clinton.
She was the only one of the three to mention him by name, and reached for his coattails on at least two of his signature achievements. Asked what crisis she has experienced in her life that suggests she's been tested, Clinton responded with her role in advising Obama about whether to go after al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. And she hugged Obama on the Affordable Care Act as a way to bash Sanders' proposal to pursue a single-payer health care system.
Later, she argued that "President Obama deserves more credit than he gets for what he's gotten done in Washington despite the Republican oppression."
The New Republic notes that at the debate, “We Just Saw the Hillary Clinton That Republicans Will Have to Beat”:
In fact, Clinton is already taking the fight to Republicans. As in the first debate, she took pains to point to the GOP as the collective enemy and main barrier to progress:
“Look at what’s happening with the Republicans. They are doing everything they can to prevent the voices of Americans to be heard. They’re trying to prevent people from registering to vote. We do need to take on the Republicans very clearly and directly.
“What I see in their debates—they are putting forth alarming plans. All of us support funding Planned Parenthood, all of us believe that climate change is real, all us want equal pay for equal work—they don’t believe in any of that,” she said. “Let’s focus on what this election is going to be about.”
As I’ve argued before, this is the strongest case that Clinton has to make in the primary and the general election, no matter who the Republican nominee is: She doesn’t need to prove that she’s “likable,” just that she’s a strong leader who will be in the best position to hold the line against a GOP that has moved farther and farther to the right—and who will extract what victories she can through executive action given a Congress that will very likely remain under Republican control.
It’s much the same strategy that Obama has embraced throughout his second term, and Clinton made it clear during the debate that she is running to defend his accomplishments. The case she made against Sanders’s single-payer plan, for instance, wasn’t that it’s too expensive or too socialist, but that it would dismantle Obamacare and end up empowering Republicans by creating a national system administered by the states. “I would not want, If I lived in Iowa, Terry Branstad administering my health care. I—think—I think as Democrats we ought to proudly support the Affordable Care Act, improve it, and make it the model that we know it can be,” she said.