POLITICS

Hillary Clinton Turns Up Heat on Bernie Sanders in a Sharp Debate

By MICHAEL BARBARO and AMY CHOZICKOCT. 13, 2015

Hillary Rodham Clinton, seeking to halt the momentum of her insurgent challenger, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, aggressively questioned his values, positions and voting history in the first Democratic presidential debate on Tuesday night, turning a showdown that had been expected to scrutinize her character into a forceful critique of his record.

In a series of sometimes biting exchanges, Mrs. Clinton declared that Mr. Sanders was mistaken in his handling of crucial votes on gun control and misguided in his grasp of the essentialness of capitalism to the American identity. Mocking Mr. Sanders’s admiration for the health care system of Denmark, she interrupted a moderator to offer a stinging assessment of his logic, suggesting he was unprepared to grapple with the realities of governing a superpower.

“We are not Denmark,” Mrs. Clinton said, adding, “We are the United States of America.”

The crowd erupted in applause.

A few moments later, Mrs. Clinton took aim at what may be Mr. Sanders’s greatest vulnerability with the Democratic left, asking why he had voted to shield gun makers and dealers from liability lawsuits. Mr. Sanders, who linked his record on gun control to his representation of a rural state, called the bill “large and complicated.”

“I was in the Senate at the same time,” Mrs. Clinton replied. “It wasn’t that complicated to me. It was pretty straightforward.”

Asked if Mr. Sanders had been tough enough on guns during his nearly decade-long career in the Senate, Mrs. Clinton offered a sharp reply: “No. Not at all.”

“I think that we have to look at the fact that we lose 90 people a day from gun violence,” she said. “This has gone on too long, and it’s time the entire country stood up against the N.R.A.”

It was a dominant performance that showcased Mrs. Clinton’s political arsenal: a long record of appearances in presidential debates, intense and diligent preparation, and a nimbleness and humor largely lacking in her male counterparts. She let no opportunity pass her by. When Mr. Sanders described the conflict in Syria as “a quagmire within a quagmire,” but said that he did not support sending American ground troops there, Mrs. Clinton interjected energetically: “Nobody does. Nobody does, Senator Sanders.”

For Mr. Sanders, it was an evening of unexpectedly forceful challenges, both from Mrs. Clinton and from the moderator. At times, he seemed somewhat exasperated and unsure about how to match Mrs. Clinton’s agility. One of his most memorable moments appeared to be when he sought to shield Mrs. Clinton from criticism of her email practices.

“Let me say something that may not be great politics,” he said. “But I think the secretary is right, and that is that the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.”

Mrs. Clinton flashed a wide smile and shook her rival’s hand. “Thank you,” she said, setting off huge applause in the auditorium.

Mr. Sanders regained his footing when the debate turned to one of his signature issues: Wall Street and its excesses.

Mrs. Clinton said that her plan to crack down on wrongdoers on Wall Street “would have the potential of actually sending the executives to jail,” but that Mr. Sanders’s proposal to break up banks was naïve. Mr. Sanders grew animated.

“Congress does not regulate Wall Street,” he said, setting off roars from the crowd. “Wall Street regulates Congress.”

He suggested that the real naïveté was Mrs. Clinton’s notion that reaching out to Wall Street was part of the solution. “ ‘Please do the right thing’ is kind of naïve,” he said.

Mrs. Clinton benefited for much of the night from the tentativeness of her rivals, who appeared wary of directly attacking the woman who represents their party’s best chance at a female presidency. Instead, they offered oblique criticisms and diplomatic dismissals. In his opening statement, Lincoln Chafee, the former senator and governor of Rhode Island, told the audience: “I am proud to say, in my 30 years of public service, I have had no scandal. I have ethical standards.”

Jim Webb, the former senator from Virginia, seemed to take a swipe at Mrs. Clinton’s decades in public life and her closeness to Democratic Party insiders, saying the country was looking for somebody “who understands how the system works, who has not been co-opted by it.”

There were exceptions, of course. Former Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland, when asked whether Mrs. Clinton would be too quick to use American military force, scolded her for her 2002 Senate vote to authorize military action in Iraq, saying the vote had been carried out “under false pretenses” and calling it “one of the worst blunders in modern American history.”

Mr. O’Malley, who has struggled to match Mrs. Clinton’s organizational might and Mr. Sanders’s message, repeatedly found ways to stand out, calling for expanding the Affordable Care Act to cover the children of undocumented immigrants.

“We are a nation of immigrants,” he said. “I am for a generous, compassionate America that says we are all in this together.”

As the debate wore on, Mr. O’Malley recalled hearing from Americans of all stripes that they hungered for new, post-Clinton leadership.

“I respect what Secretary Clinton and her husband have done for our country, but our country needs new leadership to move forward,” he said.

For Mrs. Clinton, the forum was a highly anticipated return to the debate stage after a seven-year hiatus and a season of remarkable political convulsions: the revelation that she relied exclusively on a private email server as secretary of state; the emergence of Mr. Sanders, a once-obscure senator from Vermont, as a potent rival in Iowa and New Hampshire; the threat of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s entering the race; and the restless liberal tide within the Democratic electorate that she is struggling to command.

She seemed highly attuned to what may be her biggest vulnerabilities in 2016: her authenticity and questions about whether she cares about the problems of ordinary people. In a CBS News poll released Sunday, 61 percent of registered voters said they did not trust her, and 48 percent said she did not care about people like them.

In Las Vegas, she smiled and laughed regularly. After a commercial break, she joked about the duration of her allotted bathroom break. “It does take me a little longer,” she said.

In a bid to reverse those troubling poll numbers, Mrs. Clinton has thrown herself onto pop-culture stages and displayed a warmer, less guarded side of herself, even appearing as a sympathetic bartender on Saturday Night Live, which has caricatured her this season as a power-obsessed maniac determined to seize the White House.

The debate returned again and again to the subject of income inequality, led by Mr. Sanders, who decried the power of the nation’s wealthiest and called for Americans to “take back our government from a handful of billionaires.”

But in an incongruous touch, the debate was held at the Wynn hotel, the slender golden curve of Las Vegas excess, led by the billionaire Steve Wynn. In a strange tableau for a political party preoccupied with income inequality, a mix of around 1,300 prominent officials and wealthy donors filed into a ballroom down the hall from rows of luxury fashion stores and poker tables. (Before the debate started, one Clinton donor bragged of winning $25,000 at blackjack.)

Mrs. Clinton’s forcefulness was striking, given that on the campaign trail, she has seemed unsure of how to neutralize Mr. Sanders’s crowd-luring popularity. Her campaign has feared that attacking a candidate beloved by supporters for his quirky style, raw frustration and unvarnished liberalism could alienate precisely the segment of the Democratic electorate she would need to win the general election.

The Democratic candidates will meet for their next debate on Nov. 14 at Drake University in Des Moines — in Iowa, the first state to vote in the presidential nomination process.