How do you know who’s got the momentum in the
Democratic race? Look for the one with the bullseye on her back. Here's how Steve grades the performances in last night's debate.
Elizabeth Warren just had to know that she would need to
come to Tuesday’s Democratic debate equipped with shock absorbers, shoulder
pads, and laser shields. Not only has she recently stormed upward in the polls,
but every one of her rivals seemed to enter last night's debate with flagging campaigns.
Tuesday’s debate was Bernie Sanders’s first major
appearance after a heart attack, which not only effected the Senator’s health
but threatened to flatline his campaign. Sanders had been steadily losing
ground to Senator Warren, who had seized leadership of the party’s progressive
wing, and the news of his heart ailment added a hyoooge question
mark to his candidacy.
Which brings us to still more old news, as Joe Biden
who continues to raise as many questions as he answers. The core premise of
Biden’s candidacy is the “electability” argument, which contends that the vast
majority of Democrats simply want to support the candidate who is most certain
to beat Donald Trump. Yet time and time again– from Kamala Harris’s first debate take-down to his tepid response to
Donald Trump’s current instrument character assassination, Biden has appeared
unable to counter-punch.
Going into the
evening, Pete Buttigieg seemed stuck in neutral, and Kamala Harris was
fading back toward the "two percent pack." Four candidates were facing “do or
die” moments, as they have not qualified for the November debate. Amy Klobuchar has
been breathlessly emailing her supporters about an alleged surge in momentum
that seems from here to simply be a tweak
from “largely invisible” to “borderline marginal.” Last debate, Beto
O’Rourke had gotten his AR-fifteen minutes of fame, but his candidacy –
like just so many promises of new gun regulations in the wake of Dayton and El
Paso – seems forgotten. Tulsi Gabbard was hanging on by a thread, and somebody
forgot to tell Julian Castro to drop out for his flagrant helmet hit on Joe
Biden.
Contrast these profiles in floundering and foundering with the
resounding four-hour selfie line surrounding Elizabeth Warren after she rocked
20,000 supporters in New York’s
Washington Square Park on Monday, September 16. Warren then ascended to the
pinnacle of the progressive media-industrial complex, appearing on Colbert and
Maddow before the news cycle was over. Elizabeth Warren was not just on a roll,
she was a steamroller.
Thus the stage was set for Tuesday night’s Democratic
debate in Westerville, Ohio. Buckle that seatbelt, Elizabeth, and prepare for incoming.
The opening area of question was about the Democratic
candidates’ views of the impeachment of Donald Trump. This rapidly devolved
into a contest about which candidate could express the most aggrieved shock and
outrage at Trump’s behavior, and functioned simply as the same type of vocal
chord warm-up exercise that oratorio singers do before performing “The
Messiah.”
Very rapidly, however, the introduction of the subject of healthcare
yet again proved to be brutally divisive. Once more, a pitched battle exploded between the progressives (Warren and Sanders) who advocate “Medicare for all” including
the elimination of private insurance, vs. the centrist call to “improve Obamacare,” adocating incremental rather than revolutionary change.
The white-hot core of this debate, however, was Elizabeth
Warren’s repeated and adamant refusal to answer the question of whether middle
class taxes would increase under “Medicare for All.” This was made all the more
pointed because Bernie Sanders has long since openly acknowledged that such a
plan would increase middle class taxes, but that overall middle class costs
would be reduced because the cost of healthcare would decrease.
Elizabeth Warren was repeatedly afforded the opportunity to
say once and for all whether middle class taxes would increase. Her
unwillingness to address this simple question set her evening off on a very bad
start. Overall, she had a solid evening… but she clearly squandered a night
that was teed up as her golden opportunity to break out from the pack.
Much of
Warren’s candidacy is premised on her willingness to squarely identify the root
causes of complicated problems, and to provide clear, concrete plans for how to
address them. For her to obfuscate on such an important and simple issue was a
pointless self-inflicted wound. She had to know that the question of taxes on the middle class
would come her way, and – somewhat shockingly – she didn’t have a plan for
that.
Pete Buttigieg sensed weakness, and pounced.
It was during the healthcare portion of the debate that we realized Pete
Buttigieg was going to have a strong evening. Pete has been criticized in past
debates for an almost excessively cerebral, clinical approach, studiously
avoiding direct challenges to fellow candidates. But last night a new Pete emerged.
He watched Elizabeth Warren’s contortions in evading the tax question, and
immediately went on the offensive: “Well, we heard it tonight… a yes or no
question that did not get a yes or no answer.”
Buttigieg would go on to have a terrific debate, precisely
because he was much more willing to take on the other candidates on. At one point,
Tulsi Gabbard questioned whether the United States should have ever had troops protecting
the Kurds on the northern border of Syria, characterizing the military presence
as a “regime change war.” Buttigieg crushed his response, and may have effectively
end Gabbard’s campaign. “Well, respectfully Congresswoman, I think that is dead wrong,” he began,
and explaining that the role of our military in Syria was to honor our
commitments to the Kurds. “What we were doing in Syria,” he lectured Gabbard, “was keeping
our word.”
In yet a third one-on-one conflict, Buttigieg tangled with
Beto O’Rourke on the Texas Congressman’s lead issue of gun control. O’Rourke
attempted to throw some shade on Buttigieg about a disparaging comment the
Mayor had previously made about the impracticality of O’Rourke’s vow to
confiscate assault rifles. Given his chance to rebut, Buttigieg smoked O’Rourke
with steely disdain for his halting attempt to explain how gun confiscation
would work. “You just made clear that you don’t have a plan for how to get
weapons off the streets.”
As a final point, Mayor Pete allowed us to measure some of
the intellectual yardage separating him from Joe Biden. When both were asked
whether they would consider trying to expand the number of Supreme Court
Justices, Biden turned up his palms and said that he wouldn’t try to “pack the
court.” Buttigieg dismissed the notion of “packing the court,” but immediately
offered a series of solutions thoughtfully designed to de-politicize the court.
No one had yet seen this feisty, very combative Buttigieg,
and it was very compelling. Even as Mayor Pete turned up the dial on direct
confrontation, he did not appear to lose his trademark cool and unnerving
ability to speak in fully-formed, grammatically chiseled paragraphs. And his
finely honed debater’s tactics – challenging the premise here, re-framing the
question there – seem to freeze opponents. After
her exchange with Buttigieg on Syria, Gabbard seemed to utterly disappear for
the remainder of the evening.
Amy Klobuchar, who continues to improve with each debate, may
have done the most for her candidacy of anyone on the stage. Where Buttigieg is
so well-funded that he can cruise to Iowa, Klobuchar was one of
the four candidates who had not yet secured a place in the November debate. The
Minnesota Senator seemed to find her voice in letting the air out of tires of
Elizabeth Warren’s roaring rhetoric.
She
took her first shot as Warren was engaged in heavy evasive maneuvering on the
issue of whether “Medicare for All" would increase middle class taxes. “At least
Bernie is being honest here and saying how he’s going to pay for this and that
taxes are going to go up. And I’m sorry, Elizabeth, but you have not said that,
and I think we owe it to the American people to tell them where we’re going to
send the invoice,” Klobuchar scolded. Feel the burn!
But Klobuchar was not done clobbering Warren on healthcare.
“I appreciate Elizabeth’s work. But, again, the difference between a plan and a
pipe dream is something you can actually get done. And we can get the public
option done.”
When Elizabeth Warren exuberantly elaborated on her wealth
tax, seeming to appear a bit smug for her leadership on this point, Klobuchar
iced her, noting that she is hardly the only candidate who wants billionaires
to pay more taxes. Asked about the idea of a wealth tax, Klobuchar cut Warren
to size: “It could work. I am open to it. But I want to give a reality check to
Elizabeth, because no one on this stage wants to protect billionaires. Not even
the billionaire wants to protect billionaires.”
Later, Klobuchar would rise in frustration at the manner in
which Elizabeth Warren would belittle any solutions that she viewed as
insufficient radical. “You know, I think simply because you have different
ideas doesn’t mean you’re fighting for regular people.”
The headline for the evening was that simple. Buttigieg and
Klobuchar, the two polite Midwesterners, each decided that it was time to take
off the gloves… and Warren was buffeted in the crossfire.
Joe Biden appeared a
bit sharper and more aggressive than at any prior debate. His strongest moments
were when he managed to be both strident and in control, as when he adamantly noted
that Warren and Sanders had no way to pay the huge cost of their “Medicare for
All” plan, and when he had opportunities to express his unbridled loathing for
Donald Trump.
Perhaps most disappointing was the way Biden handled the single
most expected question of the night – how he was addressing the accusations
from Team Trump about his son’s business dealings in Ukraine. Three different
times he asserted that his son’s statement “speaks for itself.” C’mon, Joe, by definition, a printed statement does not “speak for itself!” This made Biden look evasive on one issue in which certainty and
clarity are absolutely essential.
But when not focused on Trump or healthcare, Biden too
often lapsed into his unsettling habit of speaking so quickly that he appears
to be a jockey who has been thrown by the wild sentences he is riding. One
actually senses that his mouth has started to operate at a faster clip than the command
center, hurtling at a breakneck pace and no longer tethered to the rigors of nouns,
verbs, and direct objects. His sentences become short stories with abrupt
surprise endings, appearing to often leave him every bit as puzzled as the rest of
us.
So far, Joe Biden has been lucky, because his two most
formidable rivals – Warren and Sanders -- were clearly from a different
philosophical wing of the party. Joe appeared to own the centrist camp. But
last night, he got a wake-up call. Buttigieg and Klobuchar suddenly need to be
taken seriously as challengers to Biden for leadership in the centrist
lane. The next round of polling is going
to get very interesting.
Bravo for Bernie, who turned in a rock solid performance
last night, ever strident and headstrong on his principles and ideals, but
somehow a little less the grumpy, angry old man. One almost felt that his
health episode may have had the effect of sanding down the aspect of Bernie
that comes off as bitter and mean-spirited. In the battle of the would-be
octogenarian Presidents, Bernie once again seemed sharper and more focused than
Biden.
A melancholy moment for Bernie happened when he was once
again put in the position of defending his advocacy of “Medicare for All.” He
attempted to turn the tables. “I get a little bit tired – I must say – of people
defending a system which is dysfunctional, which is cruel, 87 million
uninsured, 30,000 people dying every year, 500,000 people going bankrupt for
one reason… they came down with cancer.” It was moving and powerful… and yet
many people may have only heard his opening phrase – “I get a little bit tired, I
must say."
Bernie may have temporarily halted his long slide, but he
did not regain the momentum in his battle with Warren for leadership of the party’s
progressive wing.
The remaining candidates needed break-out moments to create
renewed interest in their candidacies, but none of them hit a game-changing
home run last night. Indeed, none seemed to even be swinging for the fences.
Cory Booker is immensely appealing, and scored points with
his passionate plea that the candidates cease their angry internecine personal attacks.
But this stance effectively prevented him from making the aggressive attacks on
the front-runners that proved so effective for Buttigieg and Klobuchar.
Beto O’Rourke’s most prominent camera time occurred during his
direct exchange with Pete Buttigieg on gun control. That he was unable to score
a clear win on his signature issue has to be scored as a loss.
New to the stage was billionaire Tom Steyer, who impressed with
his upbeat personality and willingness to compliment his fellow candidates. He startled with views on
income inequality that almost out-Sandered Bernie Sanders. Yet there was no moment
that made people suddenly think that a savior had arrived. Steyer was better
than expected, but did not make enough of an impact to change the game.
Tulsi Gabbard was unimpressive last night, seeming to
espouse positions that were clearly at odds with the heart of the party. She
was the lone voice who was skeptical about impeachment, and her quixotic quasi-endorsement
of Trump’s decision to leave Syria left one and all slack-jawed. It’s hard to imagine
that we will be seeing Gabbard on stage in November.
The best thing that can be said about Julián Castro’s performance
is that he did not once again attempt to commit character assassination by challenging
the mental acuity, memory, and stability of the candidate leading in most
polls. Castro was positioned at the last podium on the right, which has effectively
served as exit ramp for low-polling candidates. Say good-night, Julián.
Andrew Yang remains somewhat enigmatic, as his candidacy
and policies are so out of the mainstream of traditional Democratic politics.
But underestimate him at your peril… just visit the “Andrew Yang for President”
sub-reddit and you will see just how much grassroots and digital energy he is
drumming up. As he spoke last night about the impact that automation will have
on mainstream employment, it is clear that he is speaking to a younger generation
in their language. You get the sense that it is the CNN moderators who don’t
get it. Still, though, at a certain point his candidacy must begin to register
more emphatically in the traditional polling, and he is not there yet.
Kamala Harris is struggling. Hard to believe, but it was
not that long ago that she took down Joe Biden for his record on busing and his
failure to condemn segregationist Senators and had pundits giddily preparing
for her inauguration. Last night she
seemed unable to seize the moment and wrest the focus, often wasting precious
seconds of her response time attempting to tell parables about real people rather
than getting to her point. Harris needed a big night last night to recharge her
campaign, and she did not have it.
Last night, Elizabeth Warren learned that the reward for appearing to be the front-runner is to become the vortex of criticism. To the victor go the spoilers.
Last night, Pete punched, Klobuchar clobbered, and Elizabeth Warren was buffeted.
Our scorecard:
Winners:
Buttigieg
Klobuchar
Better
than expected:
Sanders
Steyer
Held serve:
Biden
Warren
Booker
Yang
Did
not accomplish what they needed to do:
Castro
O’Rourke
Harris
Loser:
Gabbard
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