Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) struck back at former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during a townhall event in Dearborn, Michigan, on Monday night, accusing Clinton, who raked Sanders over the coals in an interview for her Hulu documentary series, of living in the past.
“Unlike Secretary Clinton, I don’t want to relive 2016, we’re in 2020 now,” Sanders said, referring to Clinton’s efforts at rehashing her loss to President Donald Trump four years ago.
Sanders also responded to charges that he’s difficult to work with — an allegation Clinton made in her interview.
“What I would say – on a good day, my wife likes me,” Sanders retorted. “But also, if you look at some of the polling they do for United States senators … in most cases, I turn out to be the most popular United States senator in the whole country.”
“One or two people must like me,” he added.
Clinton has been making the rounds promoting, “Hillary,” a limited run series on the Hulu streaming network that details Clinton’s life and experiences, including her loss to Trump, the aftermath, and her now years-long effort to recast 2016 as as aberration, the result of foreign individuals meddling in American elections.
Early on, clips from the documentary showed Clinton tearing into Sanders, alleging that “no one” likes the Vermont socialist, and that he’s difficult to work with. On Friday, the documentary finally premiered in full on Hulu and viewers were treated to an expanded version of Clinton’s anti-Sanders rant.
“Bernie just drove me crazy,” Clinton rages. “He was in Congress for years. Years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him. He got nothing done.”
“He was a career politician,” she added, referring to Sanders’ track record of never holding a job that didn’t qualify for a publicly funded paycheck. “He did not work until he was like 41 and then he got elected to something. It was all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.”
Fox News, which hosted the townhall event, played the clip of Clinton making her comments to a chorus of boos.
According to a Vermont Voice article from 2015, though, which ran just before Sanders jumped into the 2016 presidential race, Clinton’s version of events is closer to the truth than Sanders’ is. The paper’s “Bernie Beat” was seeking to dispel the notion that Sanders is merely a “grumpy grandpa,” as he’d been labeled by the Washington Post, and cited examples of Sanders berating and mistreating his staff.
“Bernie was an a**hole,” a “Democratic insider who worked with Sanders on the campaign trail” told the paper. “Just unnecessarily an a**hole.”
“He yelled in meetings all the time,” noted another “of Sanders’ former Senate staffers.” “He’d yell, ‘I don’t want to hear excuses! I want to get it done!'”
The best a former staffer could say about Sanders was that he was obsessed with his ideology to the point where he rarely noticed other people.:”I think he’s got a ton of conviction,” the staffer told Vermont Voice. “I just think he’s kind of harsh to a fault. He’s so focused on his issues that he doesn’t have a softer side. I don’t think he’s a very nice man.”