Biden Versus Sanders

So how did what may be the last debate of the Democratic presidential primary season go?

Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders were able to have spirited debate with no spin, no filters, and, most important of all, no live audience.  Biden showed real strength in dealing with the coronavirus issue and mostly was able to keep his stammer under control.  He held his own against Bernie Sanders' strident attacks on his record, and he did a pretty good job of defending himself.  But he didn't go on the offense often enough, despite some fine points on issues such as climate change and women's issues, and in the times he did go on the offensive, he seemed to be too mannered.  Sanders made valid points on numerous issues, particularly on single-payer health care.  He was also very tenacious and did a great deal to solidify his base.  But he seemed too aggressive and less presidential than Biden, who took advantage of the coronavirus issue and used it as a prime example of why we need to fix things now and worry about great transformative change later, and Sanders was unable to convince me that we can handle radical change when incremental change is more urgently needed thanks to four years of Donald J. Trump.

In short, neither candidate scored a knockout punch.  But both of them came out standing tall.  The voters will have a say on this soon enough.

Rolling Craps?

The bruising bloodbath that was the 2020 Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas this past Wednesday night may have helped Donald Trump more than any of the Democratic candidates, though, thanks to a few bright moments here and there - none of which involved Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar - I'm not quite ready to build my Kon-Tiki raft and set sail for Europe just yet.

The biggest winner of the debate was probably Bernie Sanders, who won by not losing.  He basically held his own and didn't make any poll-changing mistakes.  But among Democrats - Bernie Sanders is an independent - I would have to say that Joe Biden was the big winner, if only because he was poised, confident, and articulate - three qualities he hasn't been known for in this election cycle.  Also, he gave a shout-out to passenger rail.  What other candidate does that? 

And Elizabeth Warren?  Warren is believed to have won the night for a fiery performance fueled by righteous indignation against Michael Bloomberg, but the quality that always made her so endearing was missing.  Even at her most assertive in previous debates, Warren always came across as the favorite aunt who always bakes chocolate cake for family gatherings because she knows you like it; this past Wednesday night, she was more like the nasty aunt who says that your model train set is a piece of junk and then says she was only kidding.  Except that Aunt Liz wasn't kidding; she really laid into Bloomberg for his "stop and frisk" policy as mayor of New York City and went after him hard over reports of misogynistic practices at his company.  She wanted to prove how she could go hard against Trump, and she turned Bloomberg into a Trump stand-in.

Which brings me to the biggest loser of the night, Michael Bloomberg.  Being the target of withering attacks doesn't make you a martyr, especially when you come to a political debate expecting a policy discussion and find yourself at a shouting match.  And Bloomberg's record has demonstrated that he has a lot of baggage to shout about.  The millions of dollars he spent in carefully crafting an image of a benevolent CEO in his TV ads went down the drain, and he went from being a messiah to being a pariah as he demonstrated his inability to defend himself verbally when the moment isn't scripted.  He knew as soon as Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez changed the rules for qualifying for the debates, which was awhile ago, that he might qualify for this one.  He had ample time to prepare for the debate and knew what to expect; this was the best performance he could come up with?

To be fair, it was Bloomberg's first political debate in over a decade, and there's always next time, right?  Getting it right the second time may not be as good as the first time, but at least Bloomberg knows what not to do should he participate in the next debate on February 25.

But, the Democrat who made out the best wasn't on the stage.  He isn't even running for President.  He's practicing law in Baltimore and promoting a book on online media.

As far as I'm concerned, Martin O'Malley is the big winner because Democrats are left thinking about what could have been, if only they'd listened to those of us who were ready to rally for O'Malley.

All derogatory comments about the former Maryland governor will be deleted.

Panic In Detroit

Mitch McConnell boasts about having spent his Senate career ensuring that America won't become like Europe (right, good schools, gun control, public support for the arts, a humane criminal justice system, universal health care, high-speed rail, who wants any of that?), and recent polling shows that Democratic voters, while ready for a change from Trump, aren't prepared to go all the way down the European social democratic path anyway.  They may want universal health care, but not Medicare for all.  They may want Amtrak and even local public transit, but the don't want to give up their Explorers and F-150s for Yarises.  They may want immigration reform, but that don't want to decriminalize non-sanctioned border crossings.  They do want a moderate presidential candidate, but they don't want Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.  Though progressives would blame the centrist media for suggesting all that and telling you want to think.  But I, as someone who voted for Jill Stein in 2016, have come to the conclusion that Democrats cannot have a progressive presidential candidate for 2020.  A progressive agenda would have been possible for 2016, but Donald Trump has taken us so far backwards that we have to get back to where we were when Barack Obama left the White House before we can start dreaming big again about emulating European social democracies.

So the two-part debate in Detroit this past week satisfied no one. In the first night, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders stood in solidarity for their progressive goals, but the so-called moderates (any Democrat not liberal enough for the Sanders/Warren crowd is called one) had the upper hand as a group.  But no one centrist candidate dominated the field like Sanders and Warren did, exposing the weak standings of these lower-tier candidates as they wait to take the mantle of the leading centrist or center-left candidate should Joe Biden fumble in the long run.

Biden did not fumble in the second night, despite a mass onslaught from opponents like New Jersey senator Cory Booker, and he did better than in Miami, but he didn't do great either.  This led many to wonder if he can take on Trump in a general election debate.  But what was really eye-opening were the other candidates on the second night going after the President's record.  Not Trump - Obama.  They picked on Obama's various failings as President as if they were running against him.  And Biden, Obama's Vice President, staunchly defended Obama, which makes him look good in the longer run.  The piling on top of Obama's record proved to be too much for many rank-and-file Democrats to stomach, especially when Trump exploited it in a rally in Cincinnati the following day.

The only reason Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez isn't pulling his hair out is because he's bald.    

The primary/caucus debates get harder to qualify for after this, but the field is hardly going to winnow any time soon, because there are likely enough Democratic presidential candidates who can get enough support from the polls and individual donors to keep on going and make the next couple of debates a two-night affair like Miami and Detroit were.  And they'll debate about the same old things - immigration, Medicare expansion - and not talk so much about the economy and the everyday struggles of ordinary Americans.  Good grief, a GM transmission factory in the Detroit suburb of Warren just closed, and even that couldn't spark a discussion among the candidates in the Detroit debate on what they could do for average voters who don't want to hear about exotic or revolutionary programs when all they want to know is how they're going to make it.  The factory closing was a tailor-made subject for someone like Tim Ryan, yet he was unable to get the opportunity to break out of the pack. As for Biden, he wants to talk about meat-and-potatoes issues, but he's constrained by what many of the other candidates want to talk about, and, say, rebuilding our infrastructure isn't one of them.  So don't expect him to stand up for Amtrak - a pet issue of his - any time soon in one of these debates.

And you know the Democrats are in trouble when pundits are actually finding Marianne Williamson impressive.

I'm not supporting anyone for President in the Democratic nomination process because I'm an independent.  Instead, I've been continuing my quixotic efforts to get Volkswagen to keep the standard Golf in its North American lineup when the eighth-generation model debuts.  Between that and supporting a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, I'd rather continue to fight to keep the standard Golf in this market.  At least I know I have a better chance of success there.     

Never Mind the Bullock, Here's the Debate

Montana governor Steve Bullock is one of the stronger candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, positioned in the center but liberal enough on key issues to appease all but the most hardcore leftists.  He's pro-choice, he supports campaign finance reform and Internet neutrality, and he believes climate is a real problem that must be dealt with. 

But people outside Montana, most of whom have never heard of him, likely won't get to hear what he says about anything, because he doesn't have enough individual donors or doesn't score high enough in polls to qualify for the two-day Democratic presidential debate later this month.  According to the rules set by the Democratic National Committee, which I won't get into here, a seasoned politician like Bullock can't qualify for the first debate but inexperienced candidates like Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang do.

Some say that Bullock should have declared his candidacy earlier to get traction sooner, but he was busy getting the Republican-dominated Montana legislature to expand Medicaid (successfully, as it turned out) because he thought that governing is more important than campaigning.  Bullock has protested the formula the DNC uses to determine who will be in this first debate and who won't be and which polls are used, but it's more likely than not that he'll have to sit this one out.  He might get in to a later debate if other candidates drop out and if he's able to meet the higher threshold for qualifying in debates down the road, so what he should do is ramp up his campaign in Iowa to get himself noticed.

Only one out of these 23 candidates can win the nomination, though, so Bullock will more likely be a Cabinet officer than President if the Democrats win back the White House in 2020.  I say, make him Secretary of the Interior.  And Washington Governor Jay Inslee, if he's not President, should be EPA director.

Right.  Fifteen Democratic presidential candidates down, eight to go, including Joe Biden . . . and I may have to revisit some of the others . . .    

I Gotta Get a Grip

You know all of those times on this blog that I accused Hillary Clinton of telling Martin O'Malley to "get a grip" when he went off a tirade about gun control in a Democratic presidential debate?  Well it turns out that I misremembered what was said.

In the Democratic 2016 presidential debate that took place in December 2015, O'Malley blamed the federal government's failure to pass gun legislation, an action he achieved in Maryland as that state's governor, on the "flip-flopping political approach in Washington that both of my two colleagues on this stage have represented there for the last forty years."

At that point, Sanders replied, "Whoa, whoa, whoa.  Calm down a little bit, Martin."  Hillary Clinton then said, "Let's tell the truth, Martin." 

"I am telling the truth," O'Malley replied.

Clinton and Sanders then responded by saying that O'Malley had misrepresented their records on gun control, but O'Malley refused to concede the point.  Whether he was telling the truth about his primary opponents' positions on guns or not, though, Hillary Clinton did not say to O'Malley, "Get a grip, Martin."

The funny thing is, I watched that debate myself, and I could have sworn remembering that she did tell him to "get a grip."  But the transcript of the debate shows otherwise, and a USA Today article about that very moment in the debate concurs with the transcript.  But then, there have been times when I can't even remember what I had for lunch the day before, and there were a couple of times when I distinctly remembered things that could never have happened, as I explained in this blog entry from a few years ago.  So, no, Hillary did not go nasty on O'Malley and tell him to get a grip, and I apologize for having said - here and elsewhere - that she did.

I also apologize for the sore-thumb typos in my since-fixed post about what happened in Las Vegas. :-O

However, I maintain that when Bernie and Hillary descended on O'Malley in that moment during that debate, Bernie acted like he was O'Malley's dad and Hillary acted like the aunt you can't stand but tolerate because she's married to your mom's brother.

Ugh.  I think I need a vacation.  I've been having a tough time lately . . .. :-(