Bernie Sanders' fury meets Hillary Clinton's pragmatism in Brooklyn debate

Will New Yorkers' hearts shrink before Bernie Sanders' bitterness or vote for his 'political revolution'?

Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders speaks during the CNN Democratic Presidential Primary Debate with Hillary Clinton in Brooklyn (PA)

Bernie Sanders is tirelessly consistent. He says he stands with the workers and this week he did just that, stepping out with picketing employees of Verizon, never mind the corporate ire he would attract.

On the trail, he speaks up for Palestinians under Israeli oppression, and he did so again in Thursday night’s debate with Hillary Clinton before millions, never mind that New York has its primary on Tuesday.

But he is also tirelessly angry. There was a reason that after he and Ms Clinton went full bore at their debate trying to diminish the other and burnish themselves they called it the Brawl in Brooklyn.

He hammered and she hammered back. He questioned her judgement, she questioned his record. They shouted over one another. But Bernie was the bitter one, red faced and glowering.

Ms Clinton had resisted having this debate at all – the ninth between them - seeing little upside in giving oxygen to the Senator from Vermont, who, in spite of scoring a string of big victories in recent state contests, needs a breakthrough more than she does. And that must come in New York next week.

Probably, their two-hour match did little to change the dynamic of the race, which is bad news for Mr Sanders who remains the underdog in New York and, whether his supporters like it or not, remains seriously adrift in the race to win delegates before the nominating convention in July in Philadelphia.

The reviews, when they came, were not kind to him. He had had a chance to show he can be more than the angry candidate and had flunked it. Luckily for him, he surely missed most of them, because he was busy being the consistent candidate again.

He had flown overnight to Rome to address a social justice conference at the Vatican – just his kind of thing – and he had accepted. It was another risk he was willing to take. Which other candidate would vanish form the campaign with hours until polling time?

“When I received this invitation it was so moving to me, that it was something that I just simply could not refuse to attend,” he explained to a scrum of reporters under the Italian sun. On the trail, Mr Sanders has repeatedly cited Pope Francis, notably his words on the “idolatry of money” and on climate change.

Credit is due Mr Sanders for something else – expanding the boundaries of ordinary American politics. What more jarring an event than to see a leading politician from the United States appearing in Europe to question the morality of free-market capitalism?

“At a time when so few have so much, and so many have so little, we must reject the foundations of this contemporary economy as immoral and unsustainable,” he told the conference.

Or what could be more electrifying than a candidate for president standing on a debate stage with his rival and squarely speaking up for the innocent Palestinians killed and wounded during what he called the “disproportionate” Israeli assault on Gaza in 2014?

The gasps of the Jewish lobby might have changed the tide cycle of New York Harbour for good. It is an unwritten rule of New York politics that you never, ever criticise Israel openly. And surely not when you are days from an election in the state.

And yet here was Mr Sanders declaring: "We are going to have to say that Netanyahu is not right all the time," referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Nothing stops Mr Sanders from pushing those boundaries - and pushing Ms Clinton. Still on foreign policy, he assailed her for her role in the toppling by the allies of Muamar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011, pointing to an admission made by President Barack Obama this week that not planning properly for what was meant to happen the “day after” in Libya may have been the biggest mistake he made in office.

The Senator also managed to elicit from the former first lady what may be her most explicit expression of regret yet for having back her husband in passing a savage sentencing law in 1994 that led to an explosion of black incarceration.

“I am sorry for the consequences that were unintended and had very unfortunate consequences for people’s lives,” she offered.

Ms Clinton resorted to blaming Mr Obama, saying he was the one who took the decisions, both there and where the ongoing catastrophe of Syria is concerned. This was rich given that she had spent much of the rest of the debate trying to don Mr Obama’s coattails, aware that he remains popular with many New York voters and certainly its minority populations. She actually drew the first boos of the night when she tried to suggest that any time Mr Sanders attacked her he was in fact attacking Mr Obama.

Ms Clinton was hardly meek. She speared Mr Sanders on his patchy support for gun control and he struggled to offer a serious comeback. Few topics will stir more emotion in Brooklyn than the scourge of gun violence. And she also very effectively and consistently tagged Mr Sanders as a dreamer with ambitious ideas that he would never have any hope of actually implementing.

“It’s easy to diagnose the problem” she said over and over, “it’s harder to solve the problem”.

She may be right. But the question New York Democrats will surely ask themselves when they vote on Tuesday is will they play safe and settle for Ms Clinton’s pragmatic incrementalism, or let their hearts steer to Mr Sanders who makes no bones about what he is after: a political revolution. If their hearts don’t shrink before all that anger.