John Minchillo/AP Photo
Even if Biden continues to falter, there’s not room for two Candidates for Less near the top of the pack.
I. Warren as Punching Bag
Elizabeth Warren, welcome to life as the front-runner! No need for the other candidates on the stage to call out Joe Biden anymore. You’re the designated piñata.
One sure sign of your piñata-ness is when candidates direct Why-Don’t-You questions to you that could be directed to anybody else. Kamala Harris, for instance, asked why you didn’t join her in saying Twitter should ban Donald Trump from tweeting. Presumably, the fact that you haven’t joined Kamala in this proves—what? That you’re really not that hard on tech companies? Not plausible. That you’re imperfect, or mysteriously shifty, which are classic front-runner ailments when confronted by trailing candidates? More likely.
On the other hand, the sharks are specifically circling around your support for Medicare for All, which you’re very good in responding to EXCEPT on the question of whether it will entail raising taxes on the middle class. You were good when you pointed out that two-thirds of our fellow Americans bankrupted by medical costs had insurance. The fact that you haven’t put out a specific Medicare for All plan of your own, however, is beginning to weigh you down. I sense you don’t want to alienate Bernie’s supporters and therefore have yet to release a more nuanced Medicare for All plan—say, with a longer phase-in and with halfway-house plans along the way—that you can point to in answering those sharks. Once you’ve eclipsed Bernie in the early caucuses and primaries, then maybe you can come out with the nuances. Any way you go on this is something of a tightrope walk.
That said, Bernie was great last night. The moderates attacked the more thoroughgoing (and necessary) transformations of the economy that you and Bernie both champion, but you were their target. On trial for his positions but not his candidacy (as you were), Bernie was forceful, good-humored, energetic, and a more effective communicator than any of the 11 other non-heart-attack-survivors on the stage.
II. The Moderates’ Moment
Ever since they declared their candidacies, the undercard moderates in the field have had a Biden problem: He was blocking their lane, and they couldn’t attack him very much on substance, since their positions weren’t all that different from his. With Warren’s emergence, they encountered a front-runner whom they could attack. And so Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar emerged last night as the Candidates for Less. Of the two, Buttigieg had the more standout performance, though I’m not at all sure that he stood out in a particularly good way. He was the evening’s attack dog, not just going after Warren for backing Medicare for All but also Beto for his attack-gun confiscation program. He also kept insisting that arguing for the perfect somehow blocked the fallback of settling for the good, harping on the point that any proposal that couldn’t be enacted instantly shouldn’t be advanced at all (“We can’t wait” was his refrain). Never mind that some proposals that are rejected as fantastical when initially advanced—like the $15 minimum wage—can end up becoming law after people have thought it over (the $15 minimum is now law in seven states and dozens of cities).
Even if Biden continues to falter, there’s not room for two Candidates for Less near the top of the pack. I’d think Buttigieg is a lot more likely than Klobuchar to emerge as the post-Biden moderate. For one thing, he has raised, and likely can continue to raise, a lot more money than she can. For another, his obvious smarts make him more likely to win the kind of Wall Street and Silicon Valley support that Barack Obama garnered in 2007 and 2008.
Then, however, he encounters a real problem. Biden’s rank-and-file support hasn’t come from Wall Street; it’s come from African Americans—disproportionately older African Americans—who know him, and more particularly know him as Obama’s veep. I see no way Buttigieg can lay claim to those voters. In manner, he reminds me of Gary Hart, the smart young somewhat techno guy who lost the black vote so totally to Walter Mondale in the 1984 primaries that he never recovered. (I seem to recall that the exit poll of the Alabama primary showed Hart winning exactly 0 percent of the black vote. I remember that because I’ve never seen another exit poll in which a candidate won 0 percent of any major demographic group.) And if Buttigieg can’t win the support of white liberals or African Americans, there aren’t enough other Democratic voters to give him the nomination. (Of course, if Warren wins a plurality of delegates but not a majority on the first ballot at the convention, the superdelegates could re-emerge to boost Buttigieg—though all hell would then break loose, and rightly so.)
III. Labor Wins
What with the Business Roundtable compelled to reject, if only rhetorically, shareholder capitalism, some of the questions the moderators posed last night reflected this brave new zeitgeist. They even had a line of questions on economic inequality. Happily, almost all the candidates sang the praises and affirmed the necessity of unions, and some—including Wall Street darling Cory Booker, of all people—actually supported sectoral bargaining. The entire chorus joined in attacks on the power that corporations wield, though Buttigieg and Klobuchar carefully avoided saying anything that could estrange potential Wall Street donors. We know there’s extreme inequality, they said, but (joined by Andrew Yang) they didn’t cotton to the idea of a wealth tax.
IV. Reproductive Freedom (and Reproductive Justice) Wins
This was another issue where the chorus sang together, with the predictable exception of Tulsi Gabbard, whose earlier political career featured outright opposition to choice. Warren was particularly good on how restrictions on choice disproportionately impact the poor.
V. Why I Like Julián Castro
Castro had the evening’s best line, accusing Trump of “caging kids on the border and letting ISIS run free.” He also provided a particularly pointed reality check to Beto’s idea of having cops going door-to-door in search of attack weapons, pointing out that when cops have gone door-to-door in minority neighborhoods, the results have all too often been deadly, as the Fort Worth killing several days ago made gruesomely clear. Anyone who comes up with points like that is the kind of guy I want to be our next attorney general.
VI. Andrew Yang, the Trucker’s Friend
In discussing (and overstating) the threat that AI may pose to workers, Yang prefaced his discussion of how it endangers truck drivers with the words “My friends in California are pioneering self-driving trucks.” I don’t think the truckers he says are threatened will like the idea that those are Yang’s friends.
At the debate’s end, asked to name an unlikely friend he’d made, Yang answered by telling of a trucker he’d met who was a Trump supporter, and how he rode with him in his truck for four hours, by the end of which the guy had switched to supporting Yang. Could be, though, that he told Yang that just to get him out of his truck.
