Bernie and I had a spirited contest of ideas, which was invigorating, but I nonetheless found campaigning against him to be profoundly frustrating. He didn’t seem to mind if his math didn’t add up or if his plans had no prayer of passing Congress and becoming law. For Bernie, policy was about inspiring a mass movement and forcing a conversation about the Democratic Party’s values and priorities. By that standard, I would say he succeeded. But it worried me. I’ve always believed that it’s dangerous to make big promises if you have no idea how you’re going to keep them. When you don’t deliver, it will make people even more cynical about government.
No matter how bold and progressive my policy proposals were—and they were significantly bolder and more progressive than anything President Obama or I had proposed in 2008—Bernie would come out with something even bigger, loftier, and leftier, regardless of whether it was realistic or not. That left me to play the unenviable role of spoilsport schoolmarm, pointing out that there was no way Bernie could keep his promises or deliver real results.
Jake Sullivan, my top policy advisor, told me it reminded him of a scene from the 1998 movie There’s Something About Mary. A deranged hitchhiker says he’s come up with a brilliant plan. Instead of the famous “eight-minute abs” exercise routine, he’s going to market “seven-minute abs.” It’s the same, just quicker. Then the driver, played by Ben Stiller, says, “Well, why not six-minute abs?” That’s what it was like in policy debates with Bernie. We would propose a bold infrastructure investment plan or an ambitious new apprenticeship program for young people, and then Bernie would announce basically the same thing, but bigger. On issue after issue, it was like he kept proposing four-minute abs, or even no-minute abs. Magic abs!
Someone sent me a Facebook post that summed up the dynamic in which we were caught:
BERNIE: I think America should get a pony.
HILLARY: How will you pay for the pony? Where will the pony come from? How will you get Congress to agree to the pony?
BERNIE: Hillary thinks America doesn’t deserve a pony.
BERNIE SUPPORTERS: Hillary hates ponies!
HILLARY: Actually, I love ponies.
BERNIE SUPPORTERS: She changed her position on ponies! #WhichHillary? #WitchHillary
HEADLINE: “Hillary Refuses to Give Every American a Pony”
DEBATE MODERATOR: Hillary, how do you feel when people say you lie about ponies?
WEBSITE HEADLINE: “Congressional Inquiry into Clinton’s Pony Lies”
TWITTER TRENDING: #ponygate
Early in the race, in 2015, there was a day when Bernie and I both happened to be in the Amtrak passenger lounge at New York’s Penn Station waiting for the train to D.C. We talked for a bit, and he said he hoped we could avoid personal attacks, including on our families. I know what that’s like. I agreed and said I hoped we could keep our debates focused on substance.
Yet despite this pledge, as time went on, Bernie routinely portrayed me as a corrupt corporatist who couldn’t be trusted. His clear implication was that because I accepted campaign donations from people on Wall Street—just as President Obama had done—I was “bought and paid for.”
This attack was galling for many reasons, not least because Bernie and I agreed on the issue of campaign finance reform; the need to get dark money out of politics; and the urgency of preventing billionaires, powerful corporations, and special interests from buying elections. We both supported a constitutional amendment to overturn the disastrous Supreme Court decision in Citizens United that opened the floodgates to super PACs and secret money. I also proposed new measures to boost disclosure and transparency and to match small donor contributions, based on New York City’s successful system, which would help level the playing field for everyday Americans.
Where Bernie and I differed was that he seemed to see the dysfunction of our politics almost solely as a problem of money, whereas I thought ideology and tribalism also played significant roles. Bernie talked as if 99 percent of Americans would back his agenda if only the lobbyists and super PACs disappeared. But that wouldn’t turn small-government conservatives into Scandinavian Socialists or make religious fundamentalists embrace marriage equality and reproductive rights. I also was—and am—concerned about the Republican-led assault on voting rights, their efforts to gerrymander safe congressional districts, and the breakdown of comity in Congress. In addition to getting big money out of politics, I thought we had to wage and win the battle of ideas, while also reaching across the aisle more aggressively to hammer out compromises. That’s how we can start to break down the gridlock and actually get things done again.
Because we agreed on so much, Bernie couldn’t make an argument against me in this area on policy, so he had to resort to innuendo and impugning my character. Some of his supporters, the so-called Bernie Bros, took to harassing my supporters online. It got ugly and more than a little sexist. When I finally challenged Bernie during a debate to name a single time I changed a position or a vote because of a financial contribution, he couldn’t come up with anything. Nonetheless, his attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump’s “Crooked Hillary” campaign.
I don’t know if that bothered Bernie or not. He certainly shared my horror at the thought of Donald Trump becoming President, and I appreciated that he campaigned for me in the general election. But he isn’t a Democrat—that’s not a smear, that’s what he says. He didn’t get into the race to make sure a Democrat won the White House, he got in to disrupt the Democratic Party. He was right that Democrats needed to strengthen our focus on working families and that there’s always a danger of spending too much time courting donors because of our insane campaign finance system. He also engaged a lot of young people in the political process for the first time, which is extremely important. But I think he was fundamentally wrong about the Democratic Party—the party that brought us Social Security under Roosevelt; Medicare and Medicaid under Johnson; peace between Israel and Egypt under Carter; broad-based prosperity and a balanced budget under Clinton; and rescued the auto industry, passed health care reform, and imposed tough new rules on Wall Street under Obama. I am proud to be a Democrat and I wish Bernie were, too.
Throughout the primaries, every time I wanted to hit back against Bernie’s attacks, I was told to restrain myself. Noting that his plans didn’t add up, that they would inevitably mean raising taxes on middle-class families, or that they were little more than a pipe dream—all of this could be used to reinforce his argument that I wasn’t a true progressive. My team kept reminding me that we didn’t want to alienate Bernie’s supporters. President Obama urged me to grit my teeth and lay off Bernie as much as I could. I felt like I was in a straitjacket.
I eagerly looked forward to our first debate in October 2015. At last, that was a place where it would be appropriate to punch back. I held long prep sessions at my house to map out thrusts and parries with Jake, Ron Klain, Karen Dunn, and Bob Barnett, who played Bernie in our practice sessions.
I was determined to use this first debate with Bernie to go straight at the core differences between us. I wanted to debunk the false charge that I wasn’t a true progressive and explain why I thought Socialism was wrong for America—and that those two propositions were in no way contradictory. It was beyond frustrating that Bernie acted as if he had a monopoly on political purity and that he had set himself up as the sole arbiter of what it meant to be progressive, despite giving short shrift to important issues such as immigration, reproductive rights, racial justice, and gun safety. I believed we could and should fight both for more equal economic opportunities and greater social justice. They go hand in hand, and it’s wrong to sacrifice the latter in the name of the former.