Team Clinton Hits Sanders Ahead of New Hampshire Primary

(Bloomberg) -- Before the Iowa caucuses, an ally of Bernie Sanders led a crowd in booing Hillary Clinton. This week, members of Team Clinton returned the favor.

In the latest evidence that the 2016 election will never end, Clinton and two longtime allies have hammered Sanders over his ideology, his second-place finish in Iowa and his ability to get elected.

Clinton, who said in January that Sanders was unlikable and insufficiently supportive of her nomination, hit him indirectly in an interview Thursday with talk show host Ellen DeGeneres.

Without naming Sanders, she said she was concerned about candidates who promise too much.

“We need to rebuild trust in our fellow Americans and in our institutions, and if you promise the moon and you can’t deliver the moon, then that’s going to be one more indicator of how, you know, we just can’t trust each other,” she said.

She urged voters to ask themselves, “Who do you think can win? Because if you don’t win, you can’t govern.”

In an MSNBC interview that circulated online earlier this week, former Bill Clinton campaign strategist James Carville argued that the Democratic Party risks becoming an “ideological cult.”

Carville said he did not think former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign was going well and worried that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren had tacked too far to the left.

“This party needs to wake up and make sure that we talk about things that are relevant to people,” he said. “We don’t need to become the British Labour Party. That’s a bad thing. It’s not going well over there.”

And in a CNN interview Friday, longtime Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe called for ending the Iowa caucuses, arguing that they are not representative of the Democratic Party’s support among black and Hispanic voters.

“We need to start with states that are representative of who our party is: the African-American community, the Hispanic community, and that’s not what we have today,” he said.

Sanders campaign has so far refrained from punching back at Clinton this week. Representative Rashida Tlaib, who told a crowd at a Sanders event last weekend to boo when Clinton’s name was raised, apologized, and Sanders’ campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, publicly told her not to worry.

“Rashida, you’re all good,” he tweeted. “We love your passion and conviction. Don’t change.”

(Disclaimer: Michael Bloomberg is also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. He is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Ryan Teague Beckwith in Manchester, New Hampshire at rbeckwith3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Max Berley, Magan Crane

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