Bernie Sanders speaks during a CNN town hall at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, Monday, Jan. 25, 2016. | AP Photo Sanders sharpens contrast with Clinton The rivals, locked in a close race in Iowa, worked to highlight their differences.

For one final time before Iowans caucus next Monday, the Democrats were in the primetime spotlight.

Monday night's town hall -- which featured three back-to-back interviews with the candidates -- the fourth and final non-debate match-up scheduled on the primary calendar, comes on the heels of the Jan. 17 debate in which Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders clashed over the former New York senator's relationship with Wall Street and the Vermont senator's record on foreign policy and guns. Since the new year, the two candidates have increasingly attacked each other, with Sanders hitting Clinton for being a member of the establishment and Clinton's surrogates assailing Sanders as unelectable.


The town hall set-up didn’t produce any fireworks -- the candidates stuck to making their own closing arguments to Iowa voters, rather than rip into each other. When Clinton was asked to watch and comment on Sanders’ “America” commercial featuring the Simon & Garfunkel song, for instance, she was full of praise: “I think that is great. That is fabulous. I love it,” she said. “You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose.”



A high-energy Clinton also jumped at the chance to talk up her foreign policy record, outlining her role in the nuclear agreement with Iran. "Our choices were, oh my gosh, just fulminate about it, or turn our backs and figure out someone else was going to do something, or find a new strategy,” she said. “We chose the third." Clinton took credit for putting together the coalition that started the process to getting sanctions. "Then I began the negotiations, testing whether the Iranians would come and actually negotiate," she said. "You cannot imagine how tense it was…. Every situation is different, I want to make sure I stay as close as possible to the non-intervention. That's why I say no American ground troops in Syria or Iraq."

When pressed on the email scandal that dogged the first six months of Clinton’s campaign, she demonstrated some of the early summer stubbornness on the subject. “I'm not willing to say it was an error in judgment," she said.



Sanders was first up, and listed major policy differences from Hillary Clinton. But he also took the high road, couching those attacks with a compliment: “I like Hillary Clinton and I respect Hillary Clinton,” he said. In terms of keeping the debate about issues rather than personal attacks, Sanders said, “we’re doing a lot better than the Republicans in that regard.”

But he ticked off Clinton’s 2002 vote to support the war in Iraq; his effort to end Wall Street deregulation; and her foot-dragging before opposing the Keystone pipeline and the Trans-Pacific Partnership as major points of difference. “From day one, I said the Keystone pipeline is a dumb idea,” he said.

He also defended the tax hike necessary to fund his "Medicare-for-All" health insurance plans, as well as his record on gun control and his decision to support legislation to repeal a law that grants immunity to gun manufacturers. Sanders also said that despite his comment last week that Planned Parenthood was part of the establishment he is trying to upend, he admitted, "I did not say it well. They are a fantastic organization...count me in" as a supporter.

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley -- who has been sandwiched between the two top candidates during every single forum to date -- had a message for his supporters who might be flagging due to his low standing in the polls: "hold strong." Moderator Chris Cuomo pushed O'Malley on who he would encourage his supporters to get behind if he fails to meet the 15 percent threshold of caucus goers that would make him a viable candidate in Iowa. But he wasn't ready to give away his supporters yet -- he encouraged them to "hold strong at your caucus" and said he relished a tough fight.



The evening event capped a busy day of campaigning. Clinton addressed the Jewish Federation of Greater Des Moines in Waukee in the late morning, followed by a rally in Knoxville later in the afternoon and a get-out-the-caucus event in Oskaloosa. Sanders, meanwhile, held a town hall at Iowa State University in Ames before holding another event in Grinnell, as Martin O'Malley hosted events in Pella and Indianola.

The candidates are then trekking through freezing temperatures to Drake University's Sheslow Auditorium in Des Moines for a town hall event televised at 9 p.m. on CNN. It will be moderated by Chris Cuomo and co-hosted by the university and the state Democratic Party.

The event is one of the last opportunities for the candidates to drive home their closing arguments before the caucuses next week. While O'Malley must show that his campaign still has a pulse, Clinton is expected to emphasize her message of practical experience and electability, and Sanders will likely bolster his argument that it's time for an anti-establishment leader to take over. The former secretary of state and Vermont senator are in a dead heat in Iowa, according to recent polls.

Sanders earlier on Monday tried to counter Clinton's claims that she is the candidate who has the best chance in the general election. “The simple fact is that Republicans win national elections when people are demoralized, when they give up on politics and when they don’t come out to vote – that’s just the simple fact," he said at Iowa State University.

And Clinton tried to make her case that she was the one would could easily and immediately step into the commander in chief. "You never know what's going to happen, and we need somebody in that Oval Office who is prepared to deal with whatever the problems are from the very first day," she told the rally in Knoxville.

Monday night's town hall comes after The Des Moines Register, the largest and most influential paper in the state, made its preference known over the weekend with its endorsement of Clinton on the Democratic side and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio in the Republican race.

Outside of Iowa, meanwhile, the Sanders campaign trumpeted an endorsement defection from the Clinton campaign: South Carolina state Rep. Justin T. Bamberg, the lawyer who represents the family of Walter Scott, the African-American man who was killed by a police officer last year.

While acknowledging the defection, Clinton pollster Joel Benenson earlier Monday brushed aside any notion that Clinton would not perform well in the primaries because she does not have a broad base of support.

"Right now, Hillary Clinton is very strong in the African-American community in South Carolina," he told MSNBC's "Andrea Mitchell Reports." "She has a lot of support. All the data we've seen indicates that, you know, we have to do in South Carolina what we're gonna do everywhere else, which is work hard to earn every vote, whether you're white, Latino, African-American, male, female, young or old. We are going into South Carolina and Nevada after these first two states, which get a lot of focus. And we're gonna campaign there very aggressively, particularly as we come out of the turn on New Hampshire. We feel very good about our chances there."

And Sanders' camp had some spinning to do of their own. One of Sanders' senior advisers took umbrage at remarks made by President Barack Obama in an interview with POLITICO published earlier in the day, namely that the Vermont senator represented a "bright, shiny object" and thus a challenge for Clinton to contend with as she attempts to win over voters.

"Well, I think that’s the parallel to his own journey eight years ago, and I was actually supporting him then, that he offered hope," senior campaign adviser Larry Cohen told CNN. "And I think Bernie and actually all of the Democratic candidates are about a positive vision of the future. Bernie’s is about change, not just continuity in the similar way that then-Senator Obama was talking about change. And Bernie’s talking about, why can’t we have higher education that doesn’t leave our kids burdened with ridiculous debt? And why can’t we have Medicare for all? And why can’t we, even though the path would be difficult, imagine a country where people are working and they’re looking forward to a better America."

Obama, however, rejected the idea that Sanders' candidacy and message of change is an analog of his own when he went up against Clinton in 2008. "No, I don't think — I don't think that's true," he told POLITICO.

For her part, Clinton dismissed the notion that her long track record in Washington could be a liability rather than an asset this year.

"Because I think at the end of the day, people take this vote seriously," she told NBC's Chuck Todd in a "Meet the Press" interview aired Sunday. "They know they're voting for who they prefer to be the next president and commander in chief."

Eliza Collins and Nolan D. McCaskill contributed to this report.