The Democratic candidates have settled into their grooves. We pretty much know what each of them will sound like when they go into their spiels and so we had last night a repeat performance which lets the citizenry retaste the flavors to help them decide which one to favor. Joe Biden sounded confident and well informed and crisp on foreign policy. Unlike Warren, who said we weren’t up to the challenge, he said that the reason Obama had not closed down Guantanamo was because the Administration didn’t have the votes in Congress to do so. In answer to a question about the Administration hiding the true facts of what was going on in Afghanistan, Biden sidestepped the question of whether the Administration had mislead the public and said that he had been against the Afghan policy, including the Surge, all along, and that he, if he became President, would get out of Afghanistan as soon as possible, leaving behind only special forces to act as a counter-terrorist force rather than as a counter-insurgency force. Crisp answers. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were full of their righteous indignation about the woes that still prevail in American society and blaming it on the few who have great wealth rather than on the many who voted for Trump and his policies. Warren says the economists who disagree with her are just wrong, and some of the commentators on PBS during the breaks in the debate wondered how long she could get away with that. Steyer said once again that he had always wanted to impeach Trump, and that is certainly true, even if it was before the Ukraine revelations that made the task necessary, which is the way Pelosi and I both see it. The Republicans who claim that Democrats wanted to impeach Trump from Day One are thinking of only a few Congresspeople plus Steyer.
Mayor Pete, as someone who had been rising in the polls, got into a few tussles, one with Elizabeth Warren over fundraising, which made both of them sound petty and only out to score points, and one with Amy Klobuchar over age and experience, she the proven vote getter while he had lost his race for an Indiana House seat, though the fact that he was defeated in very Red Indiana is not to be held too much against him. Buttigieg looked jowly and not clean shaven, and so that distracts from his clean cut image. He is either tired or needs a new makeup man, while Amy Klobuchar clearly does have a new make up person or someone who has updated Amy’s look, giving her more make up, more eyebrows and lashes, so as to create a more youthful appearance. (I know that commenting on looks is not considered polite, but it is indeed one of the things voters may take into account, as when Joe Biden gaffed by saying in a primary debate that Obama was “clean” when he meant to say the less racially insensitive “clean-cut”.) Andrew Yang was still at it with his view that automation was the key danger to the nation and that he himself understood the problems of the disabled, having an autistic child, when the panel asked the candidates what they would do for someone who had a disability, when the correct answer would have been to say more information would be needed about that particular case to decide how to help the person, but that their advocacy for disability programs were long established. Another clinker from the interview panel was the final question, which asked what they would apologize for or what gift they would give. Most of them smiled or looked flustered. Some commentators today said the women offered apologies while the men offered copies of their books. That is what happens in our day when everything is viewed through the gender lens. Some questions are just stupid but candidates know they have to appear to be good sports and so go along where the interviewers or show hosts lead them, just as do the contestants on television game shows ever since “Queen For A Day”.
If we move beyond the individual candidates, then we can appreciate the nature of the process in which they are involved. It is largely rhetorical. That means that each candidate, whether or not rhetoric is his or her strong suit, has to find ways of answering questions that will use phrases which reframe the question so that the response seems conclusive and self-evident, something that voters cannot deny. It makes you wonder whether we were not better off when glibness was not a major consideration in a candidate, though Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt were good at that, though no one has been better at it than FDR who, in his folksy way, said only what he wanted to say. That happened again last night when Pete Buttigieg in response to a question about China said that the United States would isolate China if China created a Tiananmen Square type atrocity in Hong Kong. But that was not the question, however satisfying it is to the public to think that a candidate would draw a line in the sand. Rather, the relations between China and the United States are complex, tremendously interdependent because they are the two largest economies in the world, and so the difficulty in US-China relations is how to negotiate that relationship very carefully and not to intrude too much on the other side’s central issues. Henry Kissinger did not approve of Tiananmen Square, but he did say it was understandable why China, in its self-interest in domestic peace, would resort to violent countermeasures to the demonstrators. But Henry Kissinger was never a Presidential candidate.
Sometimes coming up with a phrase which will be given general assent can be to avoid an issue, but sometimes this same process can move along discussion of an issue. That happens when a candidate finds a phrase that resets the topic in a new way that also gains immediate consent as the obvious answer. That transition on an issue happened at least twice during Thursday night’s debate. Asked about whether cities like Miami should be evacuated because of the coming climate apocalypse, Klobuchar said that she wouldn’t do that, but that she would provide support for those who had to be evacuated. She was playing it safe because climate activists are not willing to face up to the obvious conclusions to be drawn from their point of view, which is that in the next twenty years many large cities will have to be evacuated. When it came his turn to speak on the issue, Andrew Yang said he would indeed evacuate cities going underwater just as a small city in Louisiana had already been evacuated. Moreover, Yang said that he would support more nuclear power and not just wind and solar power to replace fossil fuel sources of energy. But Yang, who feels comfortable talking about scientific issues, is not likely to be the nominee and so his tongue is freer. What he did do is open the discussion on evacuation and nuclear power and that might be his most important contribution to the political campaign.
On education, on the other hand, there was no rhetorical breakthrough. Everybody acts as if money were the only issue, and on that Elizabeth Warren was accurate in saying that student loans are a major economic problem, and Sanders was true to his overall vision of bringing fairness to American life by supporting public education for all because of commitment to the principle of equality rather than having everyone fill out forms to qualify for assistance under one bit of legislation or another. Everyone is entitled to an education, even rich people whose sons go to trade schools. Don’t mess with the principle. But no one wants to take on what Bill Cosby did when he was in favor, which was to say that families are also responsible for their children’s education. The statistics support Cosby’s view, while politicians prefer to regard poor minority peformance in school on underfunding or discrimination. So the evolution of politician insights into public policy and thence into the public consciousness moves slowly but it does move.
Another and very different question occurs to me when I consider the candidates running for the Democratic nomination. Why would any one in his right mind decide to run for President? It is so overwhelming a job that most people would think it too stressful to undertake. And yet there are any number of people, not all of them all that distinguished by their work histories, who so desperately want the job that they will put themselves and their families through the ordeal of running for the office. You can say that people who want to become President have wanted to since they were children. I think that qualifies for Bill Clinton and for FDR ever since he won his first assemblyman race in New York State and thought he could follow his uncle Theodore to the White house. It qualifies for John Kennedy who inherited the role of being a candidate from his older brother who had been killed in the Second World War. But I don’t know what moved Jimmy Carter to make the run, or why Donald Trump, who had no knowledge of what the office entailed, was moved to throw his hat in the ring.
As for the present set of Democratic candidates, it is understandable why Joe Biden thinks he can be President. He has been in high positions in public life since the Seventies and so thinks he has been trained to do the job, which is what Omar Bradley said about how he could lead men into battle: he had been trained to do that. It is also understandable why Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren think to run for President. He, for all his life, has been a leftish ideologue and he has managed to frame a rhetoric that makes his radicalism somewhat acceptable, just as has Elizabeth Warren who, somewhat later than Sanders, came to her own Road to Damascus moment. Klobuchar makes sense because anyone who has been in the Senate for three terms must think they are at least as qualified as the clowns with whom they have become associated through their work lives. John Kennedy said as much when he said that he was as qualified as the other people he knew to be seeking the title. Then there is the ringer: Pete Buttigieg. Yes, there is no place for a liberal to go in Indiana once he is finished with being mayor, and so maybe he is really running for a cabinet post. But it takes more than that to put yourself through the ordeal. Maybe, we will find out, he wanted it since grade school. Anyway, all the Democrats on the debate stage last night sound intelligent and aware of moral imperatives. That would make any of them quite an improvement on the incumbent.