MILWAUKEE — A low-key debate turned fiery at the very end on Thursday night as Hillary Clinton unleashed a series of points to try and paint Bernie Sanders as opposed to President Barack Obama — a tack that Sanders forcefully rebutted.

"Today Senator Sanders said President Obama failed the presidential leadership test," Clinton said of Sanders' disagreements with the president. Obama remains popular with Democratic primary voters, especially African-American ones like those that make up more than half of the electorate in South Carolina, one of the next states to vote in the party's contest.


Sanders responded that the criticism was a "low blow."

Earlier in the day, the Vermont senator had said on MSNBC that "there's a huge gap right now between Congress and the American people," and that he would be able to narrow that distance, as Obama had been unable to do.

"What presidential leadership is about [is] closing that gap," he said.

The evening's exchange was perhaps the most contentious of the two-hour showdown on the heels of Sanders' commanding win in New Hampshire two nights earlier. Both candidates were noticeably more subdued than at their last debate a week ago. When Sanders attacked, tweaking Clinton on Wall Street, foreign policy and other issues, the former secretary of state remained even-keeled, arguing there's little daylight between their plans and that she offers the more realistic chance for progressive change.

Indeed, Clinton returned repeatedly to a recurring theme of her campaign: that Sanders' ideas sound great but have no chance in the real world.

As Clinton looks to rebound from her drubbing in New Hampshire, she clearly sees her alliance with Obama — and Sanders' occasional criticism of the president — as a potent weapon.

Clinton listed a litany of moments where Sanders and Obama have disagreed, including when Sanders called for a primary challenge to Obama in 2012 and when he wrote a recent blurb for a book that was critical of Obama.

"I don’t think he gets the credit he deserves," Clinton said of Obama. "The kind of criticism that we've heard from Senator Sanders about our president I expect from Republicans, I do not expect from someone running for the Democratic nomination to succeed President Obama."

"Madam Secretary, that is a low blow," Sanders responded, defending his disagreements with the president and insisting that Clinton's attempts to put distance between them was unfair.

“President Obama and I are friends,” Sanders added, noting that he backed Obama in 2008 and 2012 and has endorsed most of his policies in the White House. “It’s really unfair to suggest I'm not supportive of president."

Clinton pressed on. What Sanders has said about the president “goes further than having disagreements… Those kinds of personal assessments and charges are ones that I find particularly troubling."

“One of us ran against Barack Obama,” Sanders said to Clinton to end the exchange. "I was not that candidate."

Throughout the night, Sanders attacked Clinton over Wall Street money, foreign policy and other issues.

In one exchange — over Wall Street and campaign finance reform, a central plank of his stump speech — Sanders refuted Clinton's attempts to distance herself from Priorities USA Action, the main super PAC backing her campaign.

Clinton argued that accepting money from the financial industry doesn't make one beholden to Wall Street, pointing out that Barack Obama received large sums from banks in 2008 before signing the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill.

"Let's not insult the intelligence of the American people. People aren't dumb," Sanders responded, after Clinton defended taking money from Wall Street. "I guess just for the fun of it," he added sarcastically.

Health care was another point of disagreement. Clinton said Sanders' Medicare-for-all plan would undo Obamacare and cost untold billions.

"Both of us need to be held to account," Clinton said of Sanders' plans, which she said would increase the size of the federal government by 40 percent, particularly due to his healthcare plan. "This isn't about math. It's about peoples' lives. And we should level with the American people about what we can do to make sure they get quality, affordable health care."

Sanders, making the case for his universal health care plan that's been at the center of debate in the primary, shot back by telling Clinton that his proposal would not dismantle the Affordable Care Act, as she and her backers have repeatedly suggested.

The Democratic debate top moments

"Let us level with the American people. Secretary Clinton has been going around the country saying, 'Bernie Sanders wants to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. People are going to lose their Medicaid. They're going to lose their CHIP program. I've fought my entire life to make sure health care is a right for all people," he said. "We're not going to dismantle anything."

Early on, the debate turned to the question of Clinton's lack of support from women voters in New Hampshire despite her potential to become the first female president, as well as to the off-message comments from some of her surrogates, including former secretary of state Madeline Albright.

"She's been saying that for as long as I've known her, which is about 25 years," said Clinton of Albright's statement that, "There's a special place in hell for women who don't support other women."

"But it doesn't change my view that we need to empower everyone, women and men to make the best decisions in their minds that they can make," Clinton added, also nodding to the fact that this is the first debate where women were in the majority on the stage — with two women moderators.

Asked if he felt that he is standing in the way of history, Sanders — who would be the first Jewish president — brushed off the question.

"I think from an historical point of view, somebody with my background, somebody with my views, somebody who has spent his entire life taking on the big money interests, I think a Sanders victory would be of some historical accomplishment as well," he said.

The candidates also clashed over immigration, a topic that has rarely been an animating point of difference in Democrats' debates as it has helped define the Republican discussion.

Clinton criticized Sanders for his vote against a reform bill in 2007. He responded by explaining that it was a moral decision, instead pivoting to jabbing Clinton for her advocacy of sending Central American child migrants back to their home countries in 2014.

“I voted against it because the Southern Poverty Law Center, among other groups said that the guest worker programs that were embedded in this agreement were akin to slavery, akin to slavery. Where people came into this country to do guest work were abused, were exploited and if they stood up for their rights, they were thrown out of this country," said Sanders. "So it wasn’t just me who opposed it."

Clinton responded to the child migrants remark by saying that she "made it very clear that those children needed to be processed appropriately, but we also had to send a message to the families and the communities in Central America not to send their children on this dangerous journey in the hands of smugglers."

Sanders also insisted that his White House would be better for race relations than Obama's, just hours after he criticized the president's leadership.

"What we will do is instead of giving tax breaks to billionaires, we are going to create millions of jobs for low-income kids so they're not hanging out on street corners," he said. "We're going to make sure those kids that stay in school are able to get a college education."

Clinton also quickly looked to answer one of the major questions Democrats urged her to answer after her loss on Tuesday: why, exactly, she is running.

"I'm running for president to knock down all the barriers that are holding Americans back," the front-runner said in her opening statement.

The debate was Clinton's first public opportunity to reassure her anxious supporters since her drubbing two nights ago — a loss that was expected, if not by that margin. The New Hampshire results triggered a wave of fresh doubts about Clinton’s message and organization, and confirmed that the nomination battle — which just a few months ago figured to be a slam dunk for the former secretary of state — is poised to drag on well into the spring or longer.

