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| Scott Olson/Getty |
VOX
Flint, Michigan
Tonight's Democratic debate wasn't notable for who was on stage, but for who was in the audience. The debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders took place in Flint, Michigan — a city whose water supply has been contaminated with shocking amounts of lead, where local officials dismissed and covered up the water problems, and where residents were lied to and ignored.
The episode began two years ago, when state overseers who had taken over the city switched its water supply to the Flint River without treating the water to avoid corrosion of lead pipes. Lead leached into the water supply, and although residents began complaining immediately, the problems did not fully come to light until January, amid revelations that state officials had spent much of 2014 and 2015 dismissing those complaints.
Both Clinton and Sanders have said that the crisis would never have happened in a richer, whiter city. The debate featured heartbreaking and harrowing stories about children who stopped growing, lost their hair or were intellectually stunted by poisoned water.
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| A warehouse contains water to be distributed to Flint, MI residents. (Sarah Rice/Getty) |
Hillary Clinton made a huge promise to a mother in Flint, who wanted to know what Clinton would do as president to solve Flint's lead crisis. Clinton's answer is good news for Flint and for the communities all over the United States grappling with lead poisoning that Flint represents. She vowed to eliminate lead in soil, paint, and water in the US within five years.
This plan could easily cost a trillion dollars to accomplish. Just getting rid of lead pipes would cost $290 billion, according to a recent estimate. Still, the response highlighted how the Flint water crisis has put a new focus on the devastating effects of lead on children's health.
The remedies Clinton and Sanders endorsed for the problems in Flint were less sweeping: more federal funding, monitoring from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and an investigation into what the EPA knew and when they knew it. But that's partly because the damage from lead poisoning is irreversible, and so what can be done for the people of Flint is therefore limited as well.
The importance placed on Flint was a sharp contrast with Thursday's Republican debate in nearby Detroit, where Senator Marco Rubio briefly answered one question about the crisis late in the evening by arguing that it shouldn't be "politicized" since no one had intended to poison the water on purpose.
Merely keeping Flint in the national spotlight is a win for the city as well. It's been five months since the scope of the lead poisoning crisis was first revealed, and three months since it became a story of broad national interest. Hosting the debate in Flint and pressing the candidates with questions about what they'd do about lead poisoning keeps Flint front and center. However limited the federal remedies are, the chance of them happening will drop the moment the nation moves on to the next tragedy or outrage.
Bernie Sanders
The senator from Vermont had effectively walked a fine line in the previous six debates when it came to attacking Clinton without coming across as bullying or condescending. He tripped and fell while trying to execute that delicate dance on Sunday night. Sanders's "excuse me, I'm talking" rebuttal to Clinton hinted at the fact that he was losing his temper with her. His "Can I finish, please?" retort ensured that his tone and his approach to someone trying to become the first female presidential nominee in either party would be THE story of the night.
But, Bernie Sanders' supporters have long argued that the candidate's relative weakness with nonwhite voters (and particularly African-American voters) has a simple cause: name recognition. Once they learn who he is and what he stands for, the argument goes, they'll get on board.
But, Bernie Sanders' supporters have long argued that the candidate's relative weakness with nonwhite voters (and particularly African-American voters) has a simple cause: name recognition. Once they learn who he is and what he stands for, the argument goes, they'll get on board.
Tonight's debate showed there's some merit to that argument. The heavily-black audience responded extremely well to Sanders, especially during the first section of the debate, which dealt with Flint in particular. Where Clinton came off as a level-headed technocrat — the person she thinks you'd want in charge in a crisis — Sanders' debate answers reflected the same anger and betrayal heard in questions from the audience.
Racially speaking, Sanders did make one medium-sized misstep: appearing to assume that African-Americans lived in "the ghetto." But in general, he appeared more comfortable speaking about race and racism than he ever has before, and his answers were as strong as they've ever been.
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| Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images |
Hillary Clinton
Clinton emphasized the “hard choices” that lawmakers and President Obama made in 2009, facing the prospect of a collapse in the auto industry, and she noted that Sanders, a senator from Vermont, voted against a bailout measure.
Sanders said he voted against forcing “hard-working” Americans to bail out “the crooks of Wall Street.”
“If everybody had voted the way he did, I believe the auto industry would have collapsed,” Clinton said.
Sanders’s successes and his vow to remain in the race through the Democratic convention lent a new tension to the debate. Gone were the magnanimous and polite gestures each had offered the other in previous debates.
“Let’s have some facts instead of some rhetoric for a change,” Clinton said testily.
“Let me tell my story, you tell yours,” Sanders said at another point. “Your story is voting for every disastrous trade amendment and voting for corporate America.”
Both candidates have campaigned hard in Michigan. Tuesday’s vote here will serve as a test of Clinton’s institutional support from unions and of Sanders’s appeal with the working class. Michigan is a swing state that both Republicans and Democrats see as a potential victory in November. Trump is favored to win here Tuesday, and his tough-guy message on international trade has found an audience here.
The Sanders campaign thinks that the primary map becomes more favorable to him as the race shifts out of the South, but his window to overtake Clinton is narrowing.A Detroit Free Press-WXYZ poll released late Saturday shows her leading Sanders by 56 percent to 31 percent, a gap that “suggests it may be too late for him to battle back to a victory here despite a strong effort in recent days,” the newspaper wrote.
The Sanders campaign thinks that the primary map becomes more favorable to him as the race shifts out of the South, but his window to overtake Clinton is narrowing.A Detroit Free Press-WXYZ poll released late Saturday shows her leading Sanders by 56 percent to 31 percent, a gap that “suggests it may be too late for him to battle back to a victory here despite a strong effort in recent days,” the newspaper wrote.
The poll had her in a statistical tie with Sanders on the question of trustworthiness and up three points on the question of who would be the “more progressive president.” Only 17 percent of those polled felt Sanders had the best chance of winning in November.
Donald Trump
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| Richard Perry/The New York Times |
Republicans hoping to halt Donald J. Trump’s march to their party’s presidential nomination emerged from the weekend’s voting contests newly emboldened by Mr. Trump’s uneven electoral performance and by some nascent signs that he may be peaking with voters.
Outside groups are moving to deploy more than $10 million in new attack ads across Florida and millions more in Illinois, casting Mr. Trump as a liberal, a huckster and a draft dodger. Mr. Trump’s reed-thin organization appears to be catching up with him, suggesting he could be at a disadvantage if he is forced into a protracted slog for delegates.
And vote tallies on Saturday made clear that Mr. Trump has had at least some trouble building upon his intensely loyal following, leaving him increasingly dependent upon landslides in early voting.
In Louisiana, where Mr. Trump amassed a lead of more than 20 percentage points among those who cast votes before Saturday, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas effectively tied him among voters who cast their ballots on Saturday.
Yet despite the renewed optimism of his opponents, the path to deny Mr. Trump the nomination remains narrow and arduous.
Mr. Cruz’s emergence as the most credible alternative to Mr. Trump has proved both a boost and a complication for those seeking to derail the New Yorker. Mr. Cruz has tried to undercut calls for a contested convention to deny Mr. Trump the nomination, which Mr. Cruz says would yield a “manifest revolt” among voters. But Mr. Cruz has done little so far to threaten Mr. Trump’s lead in the delegate race.
The Stop Trump forces are beginning to pour money into television ads, with a particular focus on the big states voting on March 15. Four different groups have reserved at least $10 million in airtime in Florida so far, according to trackers of media spending. That number is expected to grow, but television stations in Florida are already awash in such ads.
Two from the American Future Fund, which has spent $2 million so far in Florida and Illinois, show decorated veterans assailing Mr. Trump as a poseur on military matters. Michael Waltz, a retired Special Forces colonel, blisteringly calls Mr. Trump a draft dodger and, effectively, a coward. “Donald Trump hasn’t served this country a day in his life,” he says. “Don’t let Trump fool you.”
And a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, Tom Hanton, bluntly questions Mr. Trump’s toughness: “Trump would not have survived the P.O.W. experience. He would have been probably the first one to fold.”
In conversations with some of his allies, who insisted on anonymity to relay those private talks, Trump campaign aides have expressed concern about the money being spent against him on television. The Trump campaign has no pollster, so it is governed by public polling and what the candidate himself observes while watching cable news.
This off-the-cuff approach, and a string of self-inflicted wounds — refusing to clearly and immediately reject the support of the white supremacist David Duke, boasting about his sexual endowment on the debate stage and withdrawing from the Conservative Political Action Committee’s conference over the weekend — have fueled days of unfavorable coverage of Mr. Trump’s candidacy.
Still, members of the Republican establishment have been left to grapple with what was once unthinkable: rallying around Mr. Cruz, a senator who built his reputation bashing them.