Clinton serves black coffee to Democrats drunk on Sanders

(Bloomberg) — Hillary Clinton is trying to sober up her fellow Democrats when it comes to Bernie Sanders.

With an increasingly combative tone, Clinton repeatedly criticized her chief rival for the Democratic presidential nomination during an Iowa swing Thursday. She painted her former Senate colleague as clueless on foreign policy, politically unrealistic in policy goals and a risky bet for Democrats and Americans alike.

“Senator Sanders doesn’t talk very much about foreign policy, but when he does, it raises concerns because sometimes it can sound like he hasn’t really thought it through,” the former secretary of state said in Indianola. “For example, he suggested we invite Iranian troops into Syria. That is like asking the arsonist to be the firefighter.”

The argument had similarities to the line of attack she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, used against Barack Obama in 2008, when the then-junior senator from Illinois started to overtake her during their historic nomination fight.

Venturing onto turf that’s been dominated by Sanders, Clinton took her assault against the senator from Vermont to Iowa college campuses. The sharpened tone, from both Clinton and Sanders, comes just 11 days before the Iowa caucuses that start the nomination calendar.

Sanders, who has been gaining strength in Iowa and holds the lead in New Hampshire, has tried to answer critics who question his foreign policy experience by pointing to Clinton’s judgment as a U.S. senator from New York. In 2002, Clinton cast a vote to support the war in Iraq which she has since called a mistake.

At a stop at Simpson College, where Clinton spoke to an audience of about 500 that skewed more heavily to professors and senior citizens than students, she used a teleprompter. It’s a tool she rarely deploys for routine campaign trail appearances and suggested that her campaign wanted to her get her remarks just right, potentially for use in a later television commercial.

Clinton presented Sanders as a wild-eyed idealist who lacks the practicality to get things done in Washington and avoid gridlock. “I’m not interested in ideas that sound good on paper, but will never make it in the real world,” she said. “Senator Sanders and I share many of the same goals, but we have different records and different ideas about how to drive progress.”

She pointed specifically to Sanders’ desire to establish a single-payer health care system, instead of sticking with Obamacare and trying to improve it.

“Rather than build on the progress we’ve made, he wants to start over from scratch with a whole new system,” she said. “In theory, there’s a lot to like about some of his ideas. But in theory isn’t enough. A president has to deliver in reality.”

Mentioning Sander’s quarter-century in Congress, Clinton highlighted his failed efforts on health care. “He’s introduced his health care plan nine times, but he never got even a single vote in the House, or a single Senate co-sponsor. Not one,” she said. “You’ll get gridlock and an endless wait for advances that will never come.”