Commenting on an interview in which President Obama appeared to offer support for Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, Charles Krauthammer said tonight it’s only pragmatic, as Bernie Sanders is actually the president’s “ideological heir.”
“I don’t think Obama’s inclinations as expressed — I thought rather mildly, pro-Hillary — are a matter of affection,” Krauthammer said on Monday’s Special Report. “I think it’s the fact that with her, she’s begun to wrap herself around him, around his legacy. You saw it in the last debate, she kept saying, ‘Bernie’s going to abandon ObamaCare, I will continue it.’”
“Sanders is the one who wants to achieve the ultimate dreams of Obama over the ones he couldn’t,” Krauthammer continued. “He was the one who openly said he would prefer a single-payer system like the Canadian system, he obviously wasn’t able to achieve it. Sanders is the one you would expect to be his ideological heir.”
“I think Obama is calculating that the country is not going to elect Sanders, and if Sanders loses, a Republican’s elected and everything he did, almost everything he did, including ObamaCare, disappears and he becomes a historical parenthesis,” he said. ”So what he’s pushing for, he’d like to see, is any Democrat — if it will be Hillary, it will be Hillary, he thinks she has a better chance. So that his legacy, such as it is, is continued.”
Krauthammer also said that for Hillary Clinton, the most important vote is not Iowa or New Hampshire, but the “Comey vote”: “He’s the head of the FBI. His will be decisive. If he makes a criminal referral, I think her candidacy probably will disintegrate, even if it’s rejected by the Department of Justice.”