Despite the complaints that the Democratic field is too large, there being too many candidates on the stage, and the usual criticism that these debates aren’t really debates because they are not sustained interchanges where people get to answer people’s answers, the CNN debate on Tuesday was very successful in that it gave a sense of each of the candidates and gave the audience an education on a range of issues. The topics touched on could have been expanded into an entire political science course. Most of all, the debate provided a sense that what unites the Democratic Party is that it sees the purpose of government as satisfying whatever needs the populace has. There is no limitation on the ways government can help people, which is the opposite of what Republicans used to say, before Trump, which was that smaller government was better government, that government had its limits because government was the enemy of liberty rather than its enhancer-- or that was the case before Trump appeared on the scene to play Mr. Bluster from the Howdy Doody show: all talk, no delivery. But before getting to the issues, let’s talk about the horse race.
Claire McCaskill, once a United States Senator from Missouri and now a commentator on MSNBC, was correct in saying that none of the candidates had a bad night, but that doesn’t mean, as some other commentators said, that there is no change in the relative standing of the candidates. Joe Biden still trips over words, but he clearly has a command of his material and got in a few zingers of his own, as when he answered Elizabeth Warren’s self congratulatory statement that nobody thought she could get the Consumer Protection Agency through Congress, but that she did, to which Biden chimed in that he had gotten some of those votes in the Senate for her, and she was left kind of flatfooted, having to praise Obama for his help, which brought a chuckle from the audience at her being so ungracious about Biden’s assistance. So Joe is finally getting the hang of a debate stage at this late point in his career, and voters may stop looking at him to see when he will fall on his face or go gaga on us, and that may reassure some people enough so that his poll numbers will go up again. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren remain a tag team, ready to hold off all their competitors, what with their allegiance to Medicare For All, however expensive that may be and however difficult the transition to that system would also be, because they think a government system is more streamlined than anything the private sector can provide, it being both cheaper and more efficient to have government run the system rather than just pay for it. Both deserve being called Democratic Socialists, even if Warren rejects that title. They share a sense that the rich are the enemies of the rest of us rather than just people who do very well because of their position in the system. The Democrats also showed a very able second tier of candidates, any one of which could step up to the front rank if Joe Biden should falter. Amy Klobacher, Pete Buttigig and maybe even Corey Booker clearly have the capacity to be President even if they don’t have much star power at the moment, though I think Tulsi Gabbard, who is a not very much in the closet rightwinger, made the case against herself by saying that she was against “regime change wars”, which is a way of saying that she wants Assad to remain in power in Syria rather than have him replaced by a more democratic regime (as if that were likely to be the case even if he had been defeated in the Syrian civil war.)
Now to the issues. CNN structured these issues in sequence, suggesting perhaps what they thought to be the most important issues facing the nation: Trump, health care, jobs. foreign policy, gun violence, opioids, big tech, and reproduction rights. A pretty tall order to cover all of those. On the first issue, the Democratic candidates did little more than show their disdain for Trump as the worst President ever, leaving to Nancy Pelosi the management of the impeachment. Nobody brought up Rudy Guiliani, though I don’t know that anything needs to be said about him after the Saturday Night Live picture of him as a vampire. Only Amy Klobacher went so far as to say that Trump had blown a number of foreign policy decisions. I thought others might have elaborated on that point. Trump has “lost” in the trade war with China, “lost” in withdrawing from the nuclear deal with Iran, because now he just wants to get back in it, “lost” to North Korea, which just goes on with its missile program and “lost” to Turkey, which also just goes on its way with its invasion of Syria. Trump has even “lost” in Venezuela in that he has not been able to unseat the Maduro regime. Not too much of “a stable genius” in any of those foreign policy areas.
The health care discussion pretty well outlined the differences between Medicare for All and an enhanced Obamacare, and the voters will have to sort that out, deciding whether to hold it against her even if they like Elizabeth Warren. On the jobs question, Warren made clear that while automation, which is the bugaboo of Andrew Yang, is a problem, she mostly holds greedy boards of directors and the disempowerment of unions as responsible for the lack of well paying jobs, even though the statistics do not bear out the view that there aren’t enough jobs to go around. Booker, for his part, wants more power for unions and a higher guaranteed minimum wage. Klobacher thinks that a repeal of the Trump tax bill will raise the money needed to do a lot of things. Beto O'Rourke struck a chord with me when he suggested that Warren was punitive towards the rich, and so there was an airing of the basic philosophical differences between the Progressives and the others: are the rich, the “One Percent”, the source of our problems or aren’t they, and so do we need significant structural change or merely a return to Liberal gradualism?
Another source of contention between the candidates was what to do about Big Tech, and that resolved itself into the same debate that went on in the Twenties about what to do about the then existing monopolies: regulate them or break them up? Yang, who knows his stuff about these matters, wants regulation, while the Progressives want to break up the media companies. A lot of people seem to be flailing about what to do with the use of free speech on the social media. Do we really want to deprive Donald Trump of his Facebook audience because he says things that are inflammatory though not direct threats to people? Even the President is entitled to his First Amendment right to free speech. When it comes to guns, Biden, I think, scored big when he said that he did not want cops getting more intrusively into the lives of citizens by confiscating guns, which is something Beto O’Rourke pushes, while he, Biden, reminds everyone that he had already beaten back the gun lobby because the ten year absence of new assault rifles he had gotten through Congress as the Brady Bill had been very successful in reducing gun deaths. Gun confiscation, in my view, would just create martyrs, like those in Waco and Ruby Ridge.
Overall, Pete Buttigig made an insightful point when he said they all had to think of how they would confront the world the day after Trump left office. There is a lot of cleaning up to do. And Joe Biden went back to this point by saying that he does not need any on the job training but can step in knowing what has to be done. I think that a clincher argument. Trump was a lesson in why you can’t put an unseasoned person in the White House, though so many of the candidates who were up on the stage would be fast learners and have their hearts in the right place.