Hillary Clinton Looks Past Primaries, and to Republicans, in Strategy to Beat Sanders (Hillary Grp)
NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — “Whenever Republicans get into the White House, they mess it up. They mess it up, folks,” Hillary Rodham Clinton told a crowd gathered in a field lined with trees covered in Spanish moss here on Saturday.
At rallies these days, Mrs. Clinton criticizes the Republican presidential candidates for their economic policies (“Our economy does better with a Democrat in the White House”); she knocks their foreign policy approaches and says their positions on immigration and women’s issues would set the country “backwards instead of forwards.”
What she does not do is mention her main Democratic primary opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
Mrs. Clinton has regained her footing in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, and she has locked in the support of major labor unions and over half the Democratic Party’s superdelegates, party leaders and elected officials, needed to secure the nomination. She is now acting as if she were no longer running against one rival, Mr. Sanders, but 14: the Republicans who are still preoccupied with cutting down one another.
A substantial lead in the polls could prompt any candidate to look beyond the primary to try to get a head start on the general election, but in Mrs. Clinton’s case, gazing past Mr. Sanders to next November is part of the intensified strategy to defeat him.
Even voters who support Mr. Sanders often say that Mrs. Clinton appears more electable when compared with a Republican nominee. And while her economic message, considering her ties to Wall Street and the “super PAC” supporting her, can seem muddled when contrasted with Mr. Sanders’s, it sounds more forceful to Democratic voters compared with Republican proposals. And, as a campaign aide points out, the Republican candidates consistently criticize Mrs. Clinton, so it makes sense for her to punch back.
“I love Bernie, and I feel he’d get something done about the lopsided distribution of wealth in this country,” said Siobhan Hansen, 58, an undecided voter in Charleston. “But,” she added, “I hate to admit it but I just think Hillary has a better chance in the general election.”...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/us/politics/hillary-clinton-looks-past-primaries-in-strategy-to-defeat-bernie-sanders.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0 via NYTimes
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this snowball will turn into an avalanche! 
