WASHINGTON -- It took Hillary Clinton and her campaign a good long while to figure out how to go after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

They settled on a strategy just in time to help her eke out the narrowest of victories in Iowa.

At a rally in in Des Moines on Saturday before the voting, Clinton's anti-Sanders strategy was on display as she launched into a long set piece on Obamacare, politics and taxes.

Sanders, true to his pro-government democratic socialist philosophy, was campaigning hard in favor of a so-called single-payer, government-run program that would replace what he regarded as the halfway house of Obamacare.

Health care was a “right,” Sanders said, and one that all Americans should enjoy, courtesy of the government, from cradle to grave. He said he would institute a version of Medicare for all.

Voters would save money by no longer having to pay insurance premiums to private companies. Instead, everyone -- including the middle class -- would pay additional taxes.

Americans would come out ahead, in their pocketbooks and peace of mind.

Clinton pounced a few weeks ago, and had gotten it honed to a fine point by this week.

She said, rightly, that Sanders wanted to scrap the current hard-won Obamacare system (though she didn’t say he wanted something even more sweeping and generous).

She said that doing so was not only substantively wrong, but politically wasteful, since she above all had known how hard it was to pass an Obamacare law, having worked on something similar from the moment of her husband’s election in 1993.