By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, March 18, 2020
My advice for Joe Biden: Don’t do that again.
That might seem like counterintuitive advice given that
Biden won Sunday night’s debate decisively. But Biden doesn’t need to debate
anymore. There’s supposed to be another round in April, but there’s nothing
stopping the Democratic Party from canceling that. Everything else is getting
canceled, after all.
The conventional wisdom from the previous ten debates was
that Biden benefited from getting so little time on a crowded stage because the
time constraints limited opportunities for gaffes and Bidenisms. But it turned
out that having more time to air one’s views worked against Sanders more than
Biden.
What seemed like disciplined, surgical strikes in
Sanders’s previous performances came across more like repetitive canned answers
in a one-on-one matchup. Indeed, for the first 45 minutes, Sanders seemed more
like an old man past his prime than Biden did.
But saying that Biden won doesn’t mean the debate was
scintillating.
Senatorial arguments are always awful — “I called the
question on the motion to recommit the amendment to the committee of
jurisdiction long before you did!” And on Sunday, these two old senators
brought the same kind of bickering to the debate stage. At times, their old-man
senatorial arguments sounded like a mix of Robert’s Rules of Order and a row
over how much to leave as a tip on the early-bird specials at the Boca Raton
Ruby Tuesday.
But more to the point, Biden doesn’t need to engage with
Sanders anymore. He’s history. When Biden destroyed Sanders on Super Tuesday,
Sanders became what he’s always been at heart: a single-issue candidate. It
didn’t seem that way until now because it looked like he might win the
nomination. But now, Sanders is doing what issue candidates always try to do:
force his priorities on the party.
That effort is one of the reasons Sanders lost. The
message discipline that served him so well until now suddenly made him seem not
only disconnected from the crisis at hand but determined to exploit it for an
agenda ill-suited to deal with it.
“Let’s be honest and understand that this coronavirus
pandemic exposes the incredible weakness and dysfunction of our current
health-care system,” Sanders said.
It fell to Biden to point out that the Italians have a
single-payer system that hasn’t prevented the calamity befalling them. That’s
not to say that it’s made things worse, either. The reason Italy is in such a
mess is that it didn’t take the threat seriously in the beginning. Sound
familiar?
Sanders also repeatedly attacked the “health-care
industry” — not just insurers, but the whole system — which seems rather
tone-deaf given that this very industry is on the front lines of the COVID-19
crisis. It was like denouncing the military during a war.
When asked how he’d deal with the economic consequences
of the pandemic, Sanders used it as an opportunity to replay his greatest hits
on income inequality. That’s a message many Democrats may agree with, particularly
when the economy is roaring. But when it is grinding to a halt because of a
public-health emergency, they probably want to hear more immediate and
practical solutions, not ideological ax-grinding.
Biden didn’t seem to fully grasp this dynamic. He seemed
to be under the impression that his top priority is to win over Sanders’s
voters, even though his historic comeback is entirely attributable to the fact
that voters see him as a viable alternative to Sanders. Biden will never get
the socialist die-hards, and attempting to do so risks both losing the suburban
moderates who came out for him in droves and giving President Trump the very
line of attack he desperately wants.
In the past, once nominees of either party locked up the
nomination, they tacked to the center. Barack Obama and Donald Trump didn’t
need to do that for reasons unique to them.
But Biden isn’t them. He’s running as vanilla ice cream.
Vanilla ice cream is the most popular flavor not because it’s everyone’s
favorite, but because it’s the least objectionable flavor.
Letting Sanders pull him leftward, which Biden did
somewhat on Sunday night on issues such as immigration and fracking, would be a
huge mistake. He should have used every opportunity to turn the question to the
imperative of replacing Trump, which is the unifying message for all of Biden’s
potential voters.
The Sanders chapter is over. The general election has
begun. The last thing we need is more debates about Democratic Party direction.
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