Round 2 or Final Jeopardy?
by Tom Sullivan
The problem for many of the Democrats seeking the presidency is they present themselves as if they have entered a contest for who would make the best public servant. That is the job they seek, ultimately. What they don’t seem to grasp is the primary is really a contest for best presidential candidate. Different thing.
As they had on Tuesday night, CNN moderators framed questions built on Republican talking points and designed to goad candidates into fighting among themselves. More so than on the previous night, Wednesday’s group obliged.
Former vice president Joe Biden took the brunt of the pile-on Wednesday night, fending off one attack after another on his decades-long political career. From his positions on criminal justice to women’s rights to health care and immigration, Biden tried to regain some stature lost to California Sen. Kamala Harris’s tongue-lashing during their first encounter. This time out, other candidates joined in on assaulting Biden’s polling atop the pack of 20 that earned a place on stage in Detroit.
Standing between Harris and Sen. Corey Booker of New Jersey, Biden caught it from both sides.
“Everybody’s talking about how terrible I am on all these issues,” an exasperated Biden explained after coming under attack for a 1990s crime bill Booker (and others) complain led to mass incarceration of black men. “Barack Obama knew exactly who I was. He had ten lawyers do a background check and everything about me on civil rights and he chose me and said it was the best decision he ever made.”
Not exactly a stinging counterpunch.
New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand brought along an article of Biden’s in which he argued women working outside the home would lead to the “deterioration of family.”
Health care took up a substantial part of the debate, as it had on Tuesday with the first ten Democrats. Whether to build on Obamacare or to expand Medicare, whether to eliminate private insurance and how. Biden criticized the cost of Harris’s proposal and defended Obamacare. Harris defended, or half-defended.
Jake Johnson at Common Dreams summarized:
Biden and Harris released their healthcare proposals in the days leading up to the second Democratic presidential debate, and both were criticized as inadequate to the task of overhauling America’s deadly, profit-driven status quo.
The former vice president’s plan would create a public option and expand Affordable Care Act subsidies. Harris’s proposal, which she misleadingly described as “Medicare for All,” would expand Medicare and preserve a major role for private insurance.
For all its other pros and cons, single-payer's not-so-secret weapon is its simplicity. So clear & easy to explain: Everybody in; nobody out; no health care costs.
Tonight Joe Biden said, "My plan makes a limit of co-pay to be $1,000"— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) August 1, 2019
this flailing discussion is a good demonstration of why Medicare for all makes for great messaging. all these complicated-ass half measures are impossible to explain— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) August 1, 2019
With ten candidates on stage, it was never going to be simple. All God’s children got plans. The others on stage angled for camera time and to survive to the next round. For many, it was Final Jeopardy.
Esquire’s Charlie Pierce tweeted, “By the way, if the Republican all-stars in 2016 had gone at Trump as hard as the folks are going at Biden tonight, we might’ve been spared the nightmare.” The Week’s Joel Mathis writes that facing the heat now will toughen up Democrats for the fusillade of poo Trump will fling at the Democrats’ eventual nominee.
Booker had a good night. But he complained, “This pitting against progressives, against moderates…that to me is dividing a party and demoralizing us in face of the real enemy here.”
That is what got lost last night. As candidates argued they were the party’s true champion and sniped at details of each other’s records and proposals, none last night looked like the kind of candidate that would inspire a movement the way Obama did in 2008. He inspired an army of young, first-time voters to take to the streets to support him.
If on Election Night 2020, the presidential contest is at all close and Trump is behind, things could get very, very ugly. The country’s historic record for peaceful transfer of power could end up on the proverbial ash heap of history, as many of our other norms have since Trump’s Electoral College total edged out Hillary Clinton in November 2016.
Republicans have spent decades convincing their voters with wild accusation after wild accusation that their opponents cheat. Republican voters themselves seem to have few qualms about that so long as they are beneficiaries of their party’s cheating or, now, of foreign agents’ on their behalf. Democrats cannot afford a narrow victory next year.
Determined to register and vote for the first time ever in 2008, but unsure where to, a seventyish African-American parked near this city’s bus terminal. The well-dressed man walked through downtown asking for directions to the Board of Elections office. He ended up walking half a mile.
Upon arrival, he realized he’d left his identification back in his car and turned to go. A poll greeter ran after him and offered a ride to his car. The man declined. “Oh, I’ll come back,” he smiled. He returned again after almost an hour, on foot, to register and vote.
The question at hand now is not which Democrat has the better policy, who is more progressive than whom, or who, if elected, would make the better public servant. It is who would make the best candidate to inspire that kind of commitment not just to defeating Donald Trump in 2020 but to electing the Democrat?
Hillary Clinton was an eminently qualified public servant.