The two recent Democratic favours of the month for the media get into it, as they struggle to keep their momentum going in the first tier of candidates behind Biden and Sanders…
They come at things form opposite sides of the political spectrum ….
Long-simmering tensions between Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren, the two ascendant Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa, burst into the open this week.
Warren and Buttigieg’s campaigns each called the other out in a flurry of back-and-forths on the candidates’ tax returns, past corporate clients, campaign bundlers and opening fundraisers to the news media.
The volleys began in Boston on Thursday night, when Warren criticized Buttigieg for not disclosing the names of his campaign’s top fundraisers since April, or opening his fundraisers to the media, which former Vice President Joe Biden has done.
“The mayor should be releasing who’s on his finance committee, who are the bundlers who are raising big money for him, who he’s given titles to and made promises to,” Warren said, a rare instance of her directly attacking a Democratic opponent other than Mike Bloomberg by name. Buttigieg, she added, should also “open up the doors so that the press can follow the promises he’s making in these big-dollar fundraisers.”
Buttigieg senior adviser Lis Smith fired back on Twitter, calling Warren a “corporate lawyer” and saying she should open “up the doors to the decades of tax returns she’s hiding.” Warren hasn’t released her tax returns from before 2008, when she had corporate clients while she also taught at Harvard Law School. She disclosed the names of those clients earlier this year but has not released her tax returns from that time, arguing that the decade of tax returns she already released is sufficient.
The exchanges mark a new phase of the primary, particularly for Warren’s campaign. Buttigieg, who’s cutting a center-left path through the primary, continues to rise in Iowa polling, presenting a serious challenge to Warren in a state on which both contenders have staked their candidacies. Biden can potentially afford to place lower than first in the state given his strength in South Carolina, but Iowa is close to must-win territory for Warren and Buttigieg…..
image….theHill.Com