Democratic debate on PBS: news and updates

Just eight years ago, Democrats were treading lightly on the issue of race in America. Although he would become the first black president in the history of the country, Barack Obama himself tried to avoid the issue — addressing it mostly when high-profile news events forced his hand, like his pastor’s comments on race and the death of Trayvon Martin during his presidency.

Today, the issue is front and center of the Democratic presidential primary elections. It has come up at every single Democratic debate. It has been raised by the candidates even when they’re asked about issues unrelated to race.

The most heated moment in last night’s Democratic debate wasn’t over Wall Street or racial justice. Instead, it was over Henry Kissinger, a former US secretary of state who hasn’t held political office since 1977 and whom Hillary Clinton had previously cited as a foreign policy expert who approved of her work.

“She talked about getting the approval or the support or the mentoring of Henry Kissinger,” Bernie Sanders said. “Now, I find it kind of amazing, because I happen to believe that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country.”

After months of bizarre non-debate over foreign policy in the Democratic primary, in which Bernie Sanders appeared alarmingly uninterested in even the very basics of foreign affairs and Hillary Clinton was able to dominate the issue despite being to her party’s right, the two candidates finally had a substantive foreign policy debate on Thursday night. And it was pretty revealing.

Sanders is still much weaker than Clinton on foreign policy; he still has little in the way of policies and can’t even name one adviser on the subject. But he appears to have finally studied up enough to at least discuss the issues and try to position himself against Clinton.

Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton faced off in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for the seventh Democratic primary debate Thursday night — their last formal one-on-one exchange before the primaries in South Carolina and Super Tuesday.

The two candidates parsed their differences on race, campaign finance, and admiration (or lack thereof) for former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

One of the problems Hillary Clinton has had in this primary so far is deciding what, exactly, her case against Bernie Sanders should be. She’s had a difficult time of it because, as I’ve written, even her own supporters generally like Sanders quite a lot personally.

As a result, she’s been throwing a bunch of things against the wall to see what will stick. Sometimes she says Sanders is too left-wing, like on his health care views. Sometimes she says he’s not left-wing enough, like on gun control and immigration. Sometimes she says she essentially agrees with him but that her plans for achieving their shared goals are more realistic. And lately she’s been arguing, rather unconvincingly, that the problem with Sanders is that he’s insufficiently supportive of Barack Obama.

Hillary Clinton has criticized Bernie Sanders as a candidate who’s making promises he can’t keep — although usually this criticism is leveled at his plans to enact a single-payer health care system and free public colleges, or tear apart Wall Street banks.

But at a New Hampshire rally on Friday, Sanders added another policy area where he’s promising more than he can likely deliver: mass incarceration.

The next Democratic debate is tonight at 9 pm Eastern and will air on PBS. However, if you don’t have a TV, just check out the online live stream above.

At the debate, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders will face off for the first time since Sanders’s dramatic 22-point landslide victory in the New Hampshire primary. Clinton will be hoping to regroup and position her campaign for wins in the next contests, the Nevada caucuses (February 20) and the South Carolina primary (February 27). Sanders’s main goal, meanwhile, will be to win more nonwhite voters to his cause — because as long as Clinton is still clobbering him among the black and Hispanic voters who are so crucial to the Democratic coalition, he’ll remain the underdog in this race.

The next Democratic debate is tonight at 9 pm Eastern. It will take place in Milwaukee and will air on PBS. And an online live stream will be available at YouTube.

It’s only been a week since the most recent Democratic debate, but a lot has changed since then — specifically, Bernie Sanders won a dramatic 22-point landslide victory in the New Hampshire primary, which made it unmistakably clear that Hillary Clinton is facing a very serious challenge for the nomination.

As Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders turn their attention to South Carolina, one of the Democrats’ next nominating contests, both candidates have amped up their African-American outreach in hopes of winning over voters.

Since the beginning of this year’s contest, it’s been assumed that Hillary Clinton holds the upper hand with minority voters. Polls have shown her with a huge advantage among black voters, in particular, and in Iowa she won the nonwhite vote by 24 points.

Earlier this week, on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly made a big claim about Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders: “Trump and Sanders are the same guy, because they’re both tapping into anger, the anger of the voter, who feels they’re getting hosed.”

On Wednesday night, Sanders appeared on Colbert’s show and got a chance to respond. Basically he argued that his campaign, unlike Trump’s, isn’t racist:

Since the New Hampshire polls closed Tuesday night, Bernie Sanders has raised more than $7 million — an incredible sum that’s the most his campaign has ever raised in one day.

Even more importantly, the average donation Sanders received in that period was around $34, according to his team. That means that the vast majority of those givers will be able to contribute many, many, many more times without running afoul of contribution limits.