MASON CITY, Iowa — A day after former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Bernie Sanders appeared to have brokered a truce after weeks o
MASON CITY, Iowa — A day after former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Bernie Sanders appeared to have brokered a truce after weeks of tension, Mr. Biden launched a video on Tuesday evening suggesting the Sanders marketing campaign was participating in “dishonest assaults” and Mr. Sanders responded with a video of his personal criticizing Mr. Biden over his Social Safety file.
The escalation between the 2 main presidential candidates, who’re competing for an overlapping slice of blue-collar voters right here within the leadoff caucus state, got here on the identical day that an explosive interview with Hillary Clinton landed, during which the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee blasted Mr. Sanders in starkly private phrases.
Mr. Sanders, a senator from Vermont, is required on Capitol Hill for President Trump’s impeachment trial, and may have only limited ability to respond on the marketing campaign path and in native media markets with lower than two weeks earlier than the Iowa caucuses.
“Bernie’s detrimental assaults gained’t change the reality: Joe Biden remains to be the strongest Democrat to beat Donald Trump,” says the video that Mr. Biden tweeted on Tuesday night. The video is a social media spot with no cash behind it, in response to Mr. Biden’s marketing campaign.
In latest weeks, the Sanders marketing campaign has certainly been intensely important of Mr. Biden: over his vote to authorize the battle in Iraq, a file Mr. Biden has repeatedly mischaracterized; over Mr. Biden’s lengthy file on Social Safety, issuing at the least one false assault, according to the fact-checking outlet PolitiFact; and over his reliance on high-dollar donors, with a distinguished Sanders surrogate claiming in an op-ed article on Monday that Mr. Biden had “an enormous corruption downside.”
Mr. Sanders’s marketing campaign circulated the article. However by the tip of the day, Mr. Sanders had told CBS News that “it’s completely not my view that Joe is corrupt in any approach. And I’m sorry that that op-ed appeared.” Mr. Biden, who has additionally been important of the Sanders marketing campaign and claimed with out proof on Saturday that Mr. Sanders’s crew was selling a “doctored” video about his Social Safety place, tweeted his thanks.
But by Tuesday afternoon, the Biden marketing campaign was fund-raising off the candidates’ clashes, repeating a tactic from over the weekend.
“Bernie Sanders’ marketing campaign has unleashed a barrage of detrimental assaults, mendacity about and distorting Joe’s file,” learn a fund-raising textual content message.
The video and the fund-raising attraction centered on a latest Sanders marketing campaign declare that Mr. Biden had praised former Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Mr. Biden’s 2012 rival for the vice presidency, in assist of creating cuts to Social Safety. PolitiFact found that declare to be false and missing context.
However it’s the case that all through his many years in public life, Mr. Biden, a former senator from Delaware, has supported freezes and proposals that nervous some Social Safety advocates.
“Bernie’s marketing campaign is just not telling the reality,” Mr. Biden’s video says, happening to element his file on the matter and to say that his present plan would defend Social Safety and enhance advantages.
In a press release Tuesday evening, Mr. Sanders’s marketing campaign supervisor, Faiz Shakir, referred to as the Biden spot the “first detrimental advert of the 2020 Democratic main.”
He added: “Let’s be clear about why: He’s attempting to distort his decades-long file of proposing and voting for cuts to Social Safety advantages for hundreds of thousands of individuals. Joe Biden isn’t any defender of Social Safety, and a detrimental advert gained’t assist him outrun his file.”
Mr. Sanders is in search of to chop into Mr. Biden’s base of older caucusgoers in Iowa, seizing on a difficulty of nice significance to them.
“Let’s be sincere, Joe,” Mr. Sanders wrote as he tweeted out his own video on Tuesday, utilizing Mr. Biden’s personal phrases from years in the past about freezing Social Safety. “Considered one of us fought for many years to chop Social Safety, and one among us didn’t. However don’t take it from me. Take it from you.”
Sydney Ember contributed reporting from Des Moines, and Thomas Kaplan from Washington.