Fresh from a meeting with Pope Francis, and on the heels of a debate with Hillary Clinton in which he gave as good as he got (and sometimes better), Bernie Sanders said the intense, more aggressive delivery he showcased at Thursday’s Democratic debate with Hillary Clinton wasn’t going to be a one-off.
Sanders, on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” told the show’s moderator, John Dickerson, that he and his campaign, “a little bit tired of being beaten up,” would stay on message.
Dickerson quoted to Sanders a New York Times’ description of Thursday’s battle royal at a Brooklyn greenhouse as “ferocious.”
Sanders begged to differ. “Ferocious, I’m not quite sure what that word means,” he said. “I think what has happened is that I have become a little bit tired of being beaten up by the negativity of the Clinton campaign. And we’re responding in kind. Look, the differences that we have in how we raise money — she has super PACs and raises whole lot of money from Wall Street and other powerful special interests.”
Describing other differences, such as their respective stands on the minimum wage, fracking and the war in Iraq, underscoring how Clinton’s views “are very different than mine.”
Sanders then went on to focus on the economic differences between he and Clinton — including another call to break up the banks — and to reveal what he said was a difference in ways of looking at the world.
“The broader critique is, after Wall Street’s greed and illegal behavior destroyed our economy and drove us into a major recession, in my view, the proper response, and the response of many economists and many Americans, is, look, these people are running a fraudulent operation.
“We can’t trust them,” Sanders said. “They have too much wealth, they have too much power, too much concentration of ownership. The proper response, my view then, my view today, is break them up. That is not Hillary Clinton’s response.
Dickerson said: “You have also tied her — the money she takes — to her position on the minimum wage with a tough ad in which you mentioned the $200,000 speech fees that she gets and then that she doesn’t support the $15 national minimum wage. Aren’t you kind of fuzzing up what is an economic policy dispute you have with her and making it seem like she’s just being stingy?”
“No,” Sanders said, “it’s not a question of being stingy. It is, look, if you can go before Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley end up after an hour’s work or 20 minutes’ work with a $250,000 check, and that is your life, and then refuse to support the fight for $15, the need to have a $15-an-hour national minimum wage, I think you are living in a world far removed from where working people are.”
“Face the Nation” airs Sunday mornings on CBS.