By Jim Geraghty
Wednesday, November 20, 2019
The United States has never before witnessed a
presidential primary debate during an ongoing impeachment process, and while
Bernie Sanders insisted that all Democrats can “walk and chew gum at the same
time,” tonight’s debate — perhaps overshadowed by the impeachment hearings —
was an oddly flat showcase for the candidates, where almost every candidate
seemed content to tread water and play it safe.
MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow seemed really eager to get the
candidates talking about impeachment, which was not in the interest of the
candidates. One way or another, impeachment will be over and done with long
before Election Day. The candidates wanted to talk about what they could do
after January 20, 2021.
Of the ten candidates on that stage tonight, at least
seven should be feeling, and should have demonstrated, a greater sense of
urgency. This is the November debate. There will be a December and January
debate, and then Iowans hold their caucuses February 1. Right now, Pete
Buttigieg is leading in Iowa, Elizabeth Warren is leading in New Hampshire, and
Joe Biden is leading in Nevada, in South Carolina, and nationally. Time is on
the side of those leading candidates. Everybody else should have been making an
argument against one of them, but attacks on any of them were few and far
between. Judging from the anodyne tone and relatively few direct confrontations
between candidates, everyone must be pretty happy with where they are right
now. Congratulations, Biden, Warren and Buttigieg. You walked onto that stage
in good shape, and you’re walking off in good shape.
One hour and forty-five minutes in, Cory Booker finally
got a good shot in at Biden, observing that Biden still hesitated to legalize
marijuana, and joked, “I thought you were high when you said it.” But Biden
just said he thought it should be decriminalized, and simply ignored — or
forgot? — what he had said a few days earlier.
Biden’s biggest foe in the debate might have been
himself. Biden said he was endorsed by “the only African-American woman ever
elected to the Senate,” thinking of Carol Moseley Braun. Kamala Harris laughed
out loud and pointed out he was forgetting someone.
The night brought yet another moment that belongs next to
“Chuck, stand up!” in the Biden Gaffe Hall of Fame: “No man has a right to
raise a hand to a woman in anger other than in self-defense, and that rarely
ever occurs. And so we have to just change the culture, period, and keep
punching at it and punching at it and punching at it.” Will any of these gaffes
hurt Biden? None of the other ones has before.
Maybe we’ve seen so few candidates breaking out from the
pack in these debates because it’s hard to shine in a 90-second increment once
every 20 minutes or so. Perhaps it’s almost impossible to gain traction when
there are ten candidates on a stage. But a lot of these candidates use their
infrequent questions as opportunities to do bite-sized versions of their stump
speeches, or roll out their old arguments again. Every month, Bernie Sanders
reminds us he voted against the Iraq War. Every month, Harris shoehorns her
“Kamala Harris, for the people” slogan into some answer. Every month, Booker
invokes dignity and offers some story from the streets of Newark. Maybe it
seems new to casual voters who are just tuning in now. If you’ve watched all of
these debates, these candidates are repetitive, predictable, and boring.
On policy, the candidates remain in fantasyland,
convinced that on Inauguration Day, they inherit a magic wand. Tom Steyer
thinks he’s going to enact term limits for Congress. Joe Biden claims he’s
going to turn Saudi Arabia into a pariah state. Bernie Sanders says he will get
Iran and Saudi Arabia into the same room “and say we are sick and tired of us
spending huge amounts of money and human resources because of your conflict.” (He
has turned into Larry David.) We’re left yearning for the pragmatic realism of
building a big beautiful wall on our southern border and making Mexico pay for
it.
16
Ten candidates qualified for the debate stage, but
clearly the MSNBC anchors wanted to talk to only seven. Andrew Yang, Tom
Steyer, and Tulsi Gabbard got significantly less time to talk. Yang is
currently seventh nationally; he didn’t get a question for the first half-hour.
Gabbard got one question in the first hour. That question
did generate impressive sparks with Harris, as the California senator finally
got payback for the time Gabbard dissected Harris’ record as a prosecutor
months ago. Harris called Gabbard a “full-time critic” of the Obama
administration on Fox News, which is an exaggeration, but Gabbard does stand
out in the field for objecting to Obama’s management of the VA, intervention in
Libya, and stance regarding Bashir al-Assad. Judging from the reaction in the
debate hall and Twitter, a lot of Democrats now loathe Gabbard, seeing
her as a de facto Republican.
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