[NYPOST] The country is in a rage, Democrats as well as Republicans, at the brokenness of our politics and the stagnation of the middle class. Hillary Clinton... sometimes described as
The Heroine of Tuzlaand at other times as Mrs. Bill, never as
Another John Foster Dulles...
cannot find a way to tap into that -- and tapping into that is all Bernie Sanders
...The only openly Socialist member of the U.S. Senate. Sanders was Representative-for-Life from Vermont until moving to the Senate for the rest of his life in 2006, assuming the seat vacated by Jim Jeffords...
does.
Not only did she say a few things that had Republican admakers rubbing their hands together with glee -- particularly when the subject of an FBI investigation spoke the words "no individual is too big to jail."
She also had a genuinely creepy, Michael-Corleone-in-"Godfather 2" moment when she basically said "we're both part of the same hypocrisy" after the third man in the debate, Martin O'Malley
...former Democratic governor of Maryland and aspiring presidential candidate, known locally as The One-Man Economic Wrecking Crew. O'Malley was elected to his second term driven by union support and near-Stalinesque vote margins in Baltimore city (82%) and Prince George's County (88%). He presided over more than 40 tax or fee increases, including a rain tax and a flush tax...
, criticized her for raising money on Wall Street.
She really doesn't have a choice but to position herself as the insider's insider, really, though she could do it more artfully. She talked about how O'Malley had gotten Wall Street donations when he was head of the Democratic Governors Association. "Well," O'Malley replied, "I'm not getting them now."
And we know Sanders isn't. His issue set is simple. The rich should be soaked, health care should be single-payer and banks are screwing you. The reason good things don't happen, in his view, is that rich people control politics through our campaign finance system.
He's not compelled to deliver the coup de grace -- which is that Clinton's career is simply another manifestation of the ailment plaguing America -- because it is ragingly obvious.
Instead, he mentioned Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street financial firm, twice -- to make the point that both the George W. Bush and Barack B.O. regimes had a Goldman Sachs alum as Treasury secretary.
And of course Hillary Clinton took hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from the firm, which makes it difficult for her to stage a counterattack on the point.
On health care, Clinton seemed to walk into a trap. She found herself defending the charge made (by her daughter!) that Bernie Sanders would dismantle ObamaCare.
He made incredibly short work of that by saying that he voted for ObamaCare and simply wants it to be the opening step toward what he calls "Medicare For All" -- meaning a single-payer government health care system.