Just a few days out from their high-stakes primary showdown in South Carolina, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took questions Tuesday night from voters during a live CNN town hall event in Columbia.
CNN’s Chris Cuomo moderated as the candidates came together to deliver their closing arguments to Palmetto State voters.
Here are the most memorable lines:
Bernie Sanders
On the Guantanamo Bay detention facility remaining open: “We look like hypocrites and fools to the entire world.”
When asked if he would release his own speeches after saying Clinton should make public her remarks to large banks: “I am very happy to release all of my paid speeches to Wall Street. (Makes throwing gesture) Here it is, Chris. There ain’t none.”
Explaining why he is trailing Clinton among African-American voters in the state: “When we started in South Carolina, my message wasn’t resonating with anybody. Nobody knew who I was.”
On the Supreme Court nomination fight and the “birther” movement: “What you are seeing today in this Supreme Court situation is nothing more than the continuous and unprecedented obstructionism that President Obama has gone through. And this is on top of this ‘birther’ issue, which we heard from Donald Trump and others, a racist effort to try to delegitimize the President of the United States. … Guess what, nobody has asked for my birth certificate. Maybe it’s the color of my skin?”
Asked to name his most admired past Supreme Court justice: “Thurgood Marshall was a damn good Supreme Court justice.”
On whether racism fueled Trump’s birtherism: “I’m not a psychoanalyst. Boy, would a psychoanalyst have an interesting time with Donald Trump.”
Hillary Clinton
On whether she would release transcripts of speeches she’s given when other candidates were unlikely to do so themselves: “Why is there one standard for me and not for everybody else?”
To an African-American woman who said she was looked at differently because of her hair: “You have a right to wear your hair any way you want to. That’s your right. As somebody who, ya know, has had a lot of different hairstyles, I say that from some personal experience.”
On what she got from attending a women’s college: “We ran the student government, we ran the newspaper, we ran the yearbook, we ran all the activities, so it was a great leadership opportunity.”
Reassuring supporters concerned about her email server controversy: “The facts are that every single time somebody has hurled these charges against me, which they have done, it has proved to be nothing.”
On whether she would lie in the future (after giving an indirect answer to a similar question last week): “I’ll just say, ‘No!'”
On the healing power of forgiveness: “I could not be standing here if I had not been forgiven many times and if I had not been able to forgive, myself, those who I thought had in some way disappointed or wronged me.”