No more front-runner?
by Tom Sullivan
It was jarring during last night’s Democratic debate in Houston when former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro attacked Joe Biden early on for being … old? Castro challenged Biden’s statements about his health care plan, claiming before a shocked crowd that Biden had forgotten statements made two minutes earlier.
It was perhaps the sharpest exchange of the night. It won’t help Castro.
In opening remarks, businessman Andrew Yang promised, Oprah-style, to give 10 American families “watching this at home right now” $1,000 a month for an entire year. The proposal left a stunned Pete Buttigieg gaping for a moment before he was able to speak.
“It’s original, I’ll give you that,” Buttigieg said finally.
The rest of the debate was not the expected center-stage face-off between the top-tier candidates, Sanders, Biden, and Warren. While disagreeing with Biden on modifications to health care, Sanders and Warren disagreed without being disagreeable. New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker had another good night, delivering a balanced combination of passion and policy, clearly presented with too little camera time.
It was not, as the Washington Post’s Dan Balz writes, the kind of performance Biden supporters were waiting for:
Biden did not dominate from start to finish and did not make it through the evening mistake free. But on balance this was the kind of evening he needed, after two previous debates in which he drew mixed to negative reviews, and after uneven performances at Democratic gatherings and along the campaign trail.
Not exactly. Biden tried to be combative when it was called for, but still wandered. Asked late in the debate about racial inequality in schools and dealing with the legacy of slavery, Biden launched into a disjointed recitation of his proposals for school funding, teacher pay, and addressing “problems that come from home“:
The teachers are — I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. We have — make sure that every single child does, in fact, have 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds go to school. School. Not daycare. School. We bring social workers in to homes and parents to help them deal with how to raise their children.
It’s not want they don’t want to help. They don’t — they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the — the — make sure that kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.
At the watch party I attended, audience members shook their heads and mouthed, “What?!“
Writing at Politico, Sean McElwee (Data for Progress co-founder) declared after last night, “there is no longer a front-runner. The question is when, not if, polls will match this reality.”
But a couple of the oddest bits from last night’s Democratic debate happened offstage.
At the bottom of hour (10:30 p.m. EDT), BBC radio reported the former vice president, Joe Biden, had defended his health care plan from those of senators Sanders and Warren, plans the reporter described as “more radical and more costly.”
Excuse me? More radical how? More costly to whom? Having just watched the exchanges, the description was jarring. But it fit with the framing of candidates who focus first on what upgrades to our overwrought health care system cost before considering whom they help.
I swear, pundits are literally the only people who think that paying a dollar in taxes is somehow more expensive than paying two dollars to an insurance company.— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) September 13, 2019
There were signals earlier Thursday that Biden would attack Sen. Elizabeth Warren whose steady climb in the polls is a more proximate threat to his nomination than Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Politico published a story, ‘Why Are You Pissing In Our Face?’: Inside Warren’s War With the Obama Team that described her sometimes fraught relationship with Obama insiders. With Biden’s standing among African-American voters, a story about her challenging his economic team even while fighting to keep people from losing their homes could send undermine her with Obama’s base.
Ed Rendell, former governor of Pennsylvania and former DNC chair, published a clumsy hit piece in the Washington Post Thursday morning challenging Warren’s fundraising just in time to prompt a question in the evening’s debate. It did not. But he’s taken to calling her supporters “Elizabeth Elites.”
Democratic establishment players are sweating and it shows.