As Dinah Washington once sang, what a difference a day makes, just 24 little hours.
On Wednesday night, Hillary Clinton appeared at a CNN town hall and was calm, quiet, focused, and masterful — literally the best I’ve ever seen her in a quarter-century of Hillary-watching.
But Thursday night, at the MSNBC debate between her and rival presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, she was loud, angry, combative and extremely confrontational.
What changed?
First, polls came out Thursday — problematic polls with questionable sample sizes and margins of error, to be sure — that continued to show her running 20 to 30 points behind Sanders in New Hampshire.
Second, during the town hall, she lost her Zen calm at one really bad moment when she got defensive and evasive about taking $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs.
It was the only newsworthy moment of the town hall. It was shown endlessly on TV Thursday, and it turned what had been a stunning performance into a net loss just when she needed good news most.
On Thursday night she morphed into Tough-as-Nails Hillary, the one who won’t take any guff. Hillary just pounded on Sanders, and pounded, and pounded. He punched back and matched her here and there in intensity — indeed, there was so much unnecessary shouting going on as they spoke, I feared for my hearing.
But Sanders was also happy to express his agreement with Clinton at other points. This was a rhetorical tactic that allowed him to avoid answering certain tough questions, but it also served him well; it made him look a bit more even-keeled than she as the evening went on.
The most startling moment came half an hour in when Clinton turned on Sanders and accused him of committing an “artful smear” against her by questioning her standing as a “progressive.”
It was perhaps the first time in his 74 years on this Earth that anyone has ever referred to the Brooklyn-blunt Bernie Sanders as “artful.”
It was jaw-dropping because Sanders has in fact spent the past year deliberately avoiding personal attacks on her on the very matters that most threaten her viability — her email-server problem and the revelations of the colossal sums of money that flowed from foreign governments into the Clinton Foundation while she was secretary of state.
It’s hilarious that Clinton, who spent her eight-year career in the Senate and 18 months as a presidential candidate in 2007-08 deliberately positioning herself as a moderate, would try to get haughty about her “progressive” credentials. This just proves you don’t have to be Jewish to be (as my grandmother would have said) chutzpah-dik.
In fact, her best moments in the debate (as in the town hall) came when she stopped with the nonsense and began talking with ease and comfort about the tough choices a president must face when conducting foreign policy and serving as commander-in-chief.
Those also happened to be Sanders’ worst moments.
The Vermont senator’s complete lack of interest in the subject was betrayed when he literally couldn’t think of an answer to a good question from MSNBC’s Chuck Todd about what he would do as president with the 10,000 American troops President Obama would be bequeathing him in Afghanistan.
In the end, he was who he was and if you liked him before, you liked him after. If you’re an undecided New Hampshire Democrat, you probably thought she was more substantive.
Hillary tried to seize the populist ground from him by claiming she’s the target of billionaires, the Koch brothers, Karl Rove and probably the Joker and Bane as well — because she’s just so tough on them.
She’s counting on her fellow Democrats having very, very, very short memories: In a November debate, she responded to a similar question by practically painting Wall Street as the main target on 9/11 and said her “helping” Wall Street was a rebuke to the terrorists.
Yes, what a difference three months makes, too, when you find yourself losing in New Hampshire to a self-proclaimed socialist who flatly said last night that “the business model of Wall Street is fraud.”
This formulation is oddly similar to the key socialist dictum that “property is theft.” Hey, no wonder she’s angry; Hillary thought she owned New Hampshire in 2016, and it’s being stolen right out from under her.