Live from Iowa City: : When 2016 Reporters Swapped Beats: "It felt weird to follow Hillary Clinton after spending more than a year...
...listening to the caricature version of her among Republican candidates as an unaccomplished has-been running in vain from President Obama’s failed record. Instead, she used her stump speech to lash herself to Obama’s legacy at every turn while promising to take his policies even further. I don’t think I realized just how much her campaign strategy relies on linking herself to her predecessor--one of her biggest applause lines was ‘I don’t think President Obama gets the credit he deserves for making sure we didn’t fall into a Great Depression.’...
Democrats are playing to their base on issues that they might have feared were a general election liability just a few years earlier.... Bill Clinton’s... event featured remarks from a DREAMer. Trump is running on open bigotry... but Sanders was introduced at his Cedar Rapids event by a 17-year-old Muslim high school student. Clinton’s stump speech excoriated the other side’s ‘wrong and shameful’ rhetoric.... The other big example is guns, where Clinton spent much of Friday attacking Sanders...
