Charles Krupa/AP Photo
The candidates stand on stage before the start of a Democratic presidential primary debate, February 7, 2020, at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire.
OK, I’ll go out on a limb. Amy Klobuchar had her first standout debate performance on Friday night. Just maybe, she’ll squeeze past Joe Biden next Tuesday to finish fourth.
Having made my obeisance to the gods of horse-race journalism, herewith my other takeaways.
What’s more and more disquieting about Pete Buttigieg’s repeated assertions that “we need a politics that aren’t defined by who you reject” is not just that he trots it out—as he did Friday night—as a way to say that he can appeal to independents and borderline Republicans that Bernie Sanders can’t, but that it’s his response to attacks on his reliance on the dollars of billionaires. It was in answering Elizabeth Warren’s condemnation of billionaires buying their way to election and of “people who suck up to billionaires” doing the same that Mayor Pete spoke up for inclusion.
Problem is, his open-heartedness and open-walletness to the one percent has policy implications that the debates have yet to clarify. Tonight, as in other debates, the candidates were asked if they would consider a prospective judicial nominee’s opinion on Roe v. Wade in making appointments to the bench. We knew all the candidates’ answers before they spoke; of course they would. But what criteria would they invoke for, say, their cabinet appointments? Would Buttigieg put Wall Street figures in charge of Treasury, as both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did—and in Obama’s case, having one such Wall Streetoid, Timothy Geithner, at Treasury doomed millions of homeowners to losing their homes. Would Buttigieg go the same route? Does not rejecting the sensitive souls of Wall Street when it comes to campaign contributions mean welcoming them into his cabinet and his Securities and Exchange Commission? America’s homeowners, America’s workers need to know.
Mayor Pete’s worst moment, of course, came when he had no answer to the question on why the arrest rate for marijuana possession was four times higher among South Bend’s blacks than its whites. Actually, his worst moments came when the question itself prompted the audience to clap, and then clap louder when the questioner, after Buttigieg had evaded answering, repeated it. That applause may have indicated that the level of progressive animus toward Buttigieg is a good deal higher than that toward Biden and Klobuchar, a likable old grandpa and a pushy but caring aunt. (If the Democrats are to win by having a nominee who can shame Trump on his lack of basic human empathy—and I’m not saying they can—then Klobuchar should be their pick.) Mayor Pete, by contrast to Joe and Amy, has a lean and hungry look, and a ratio of ambition to achievement that’s off the charts.
And also a callowness that’s hard to imagine facing down Trump. Trying to envision that debate, what comes to my mind is the first meeting, in Vienna in 1961, of America’s new young President John F. Kennedy and crude, uncensored Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, a hard, decent communist with more than a passing behavioral resemblance to Old Man Karamazov. As Kennedy himself later admitted to friends, the experience was like being rolled over by a truck. Trump being something out of Dostoevsky’s Hall of Horrors himself, it’s not yet apparent how Buttigieg could handle him—if at all.
Bernie’s debate-night performances don’t vary all that much. He’s the clearest enunciator of what he wants to enunciate of all the candidates, and what he enunciates is pretty much the same from one debate to the next. It’s when he’s asked something he’s not been asked before, and he opts to answer it rather than revert to assailing the plutocrats, that he demonstrates just how forceful a speaker he really is—as he did in assessing the performance of his Republican Senate colleagues in the just-completed impeachment trial.
One reason, of course, why Bernie’s script is much the same from debate to debate is that so far, the debates have bogged down in the same 15-to-20-minute hashing-out of Medicare for All and how best to get to universal health care. If Tom Steyer weren’t well past the point where he could have a breakout performance, he would have had a breakout performance Friday night, noting that this was the same discussion they’d had in every previous debate, that everyone on the stage wanted to get to universal coverage, and the real question was how to become able to do that—that is, how the eventual nominee could defeat Donald Trump. For a candidate who pulled down 1 percent of the Iowa vote, Steyer took up an inordinate amount of debate time, good—for the first time—those his interjections were. Andrew Yang took up less time—though even that was too much for a candidate who pulled down 0.2 percent of the Iowa vote—extolling, no matter what the question was, his universal basic income plan. If there were an award for Most Amiable Monomaniac, Yang would already have retired the trophy.
As the gap between the Sanders forces and the more centrist candidates grows ominously wider, Warren seems to me the one candidate who’d be an acceptable nominee to both wings of the party.
The most important possible result that could have come from the debate didn’t. Elizabeth Warren needed a breakout performance, and while she had some great answers in the debate’s second half, there was nothing I saw sufficiently memorable to catapult her higher than third in Tuesday’s vote. As the gap between the Sanders forces and the more centrist candidates grows ominously wider, Warren seems to me the one candidate who’d be an acceptable nominee to both wings of the party. To do that, though, she needs to finish either second or almost-second when New Hampshire votes. And to do that, she mainly needs to pull votes away from Buttigieg, but with independents (and even some Republicans) likely to comprise perhaps a third of all voters in the Democrats’ open primary on Tuesday, that may prove beyond her grasp.
And if she can’t be in a position to help unify the Democrats—well, there’s always the prospect of four more years of Trump. That may suffice, but you can’t count on it.
