Discussion: The Biggest Takeaways From The First Democratic Debate

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Very good point, Choska. The public doesn’t really listen to the debate, they observe personalities. Gore lost to Bush because he was too elite, compared to down home George. Hillary won every point in every debate with Trump, BUT much of the country already had their mind made up that they disliked her before she even opened her mouth. Policy, logic and debating skills had nothing to do with it.

Which brings us to VP Joe Biden. He is well known and well liked by 65% of the country. He has won the Electoral College twice with his buddy, Barack Obama, who remains the most popular man in the United States. Not one of these debates or even this campaign will change his image with John Q. Public. Joe Biden drinks Budweiser, owns a 1967 Corvette, and is one of Barack’s best friends. That’s all most people need to know about him to like and trust him.

2020 is Biden’s to lose, and all he really has to do is be the good guy while pointing out what a crook and loser Trump is, so that the 2020 election is a referendum on Trump’s first term. “Are you happier now than you were 4 years ago ?” That in a nutshell is what the next 18 months will look like.

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22

If feel bad for Ryan. It was the political equivalent of watching somebody die from an accidental drug overdose.

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That was her sister Vridavan (on Tulsi’s account, but she made a note of it), who last anyone heard was acting as her campaign manager after everyone quit. That was back in January though so I don’t know what’s going on now.

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My take, the Dems are fielding some really good and strong candidates, picking isn’t going to be easy. This is an embarrassment of riches, I thought I had it narrowed down to 3 or 4, but that just trebled.

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At a meta level, there were some things about this debate to like:

  • Dems generally did a good job ignoring the moderators and their dumb ass questions (ok, Chuck Todd’s questions) and answering the question they wanted to answer.
  • Donald Trump wasn’t featured as much as one might have thought and you know, no one missed him that much.
  • We really made headway as a party on immigration. Hat tip to Castro. Thanks to Castro we took a muscular, aggressive defense of human rights and vulnerable immigrants and there really wasn’t anything the right could say about it. We stepped into that gap and told the GOP that they’re failures on this issue. That bodes well.
  • Despite the awkward, clumsy and somewhat clownish Spanish of Beto and Booker, I do think the candidates connected with Latinx voters tonight. It is good to connect with that demo early.
  • Dems really did take on a lot of important issues and they were envisioning a world that quickly transitions from Trumpism. Once people believe the page can be turned, people tend to turn the page.

If this debate had been reduced to 7 people, I think this might’ve even been a great debate.

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Gabbard was bad bad bad. During the speed round about the greatest threat, I nearly spit out my drink when she said that the threat of nuclear war was worse now than it had ever been. That’s Trump level dumb.

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Russian bots out tonight. Er… I guess it’s morning in Moscow.

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I thought Booker’s non answer on the Iran Nuclear deal was a way to ingratiate himself with the centerist foreign policy establishment or even to the right like AIPAC. When he was trying to decide and eventually voted yes on it he would be browbeat by his old pal Rabbi Shmuley with full page ads in the New York Times.

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I’m really struggling with evaluating the debate.

There’s value in the debate to the extent that it helps bridge the information bubbles in which we often find ourselves. I met several candidates for the first time, and now have opinions about them. That’s good.

But I don’t think any of this horse-race performance assessment stuff can possibly be grounded in any fact whatsoever, because the format isn’t conducive to narrowing the field or choosing from competing goals or policies or administrators. If you were already familiar with two candidates, this kind of exercise will not help you decide which to stick with.

I know that this is all we’ve got right now, format-wise. I’ll grant that. Maybe none of us has the power to change the format, but nobody is forcing us individually to pretend that we’ve learned something from these debates that we cannot possibly have learned. I feel like we all just tried a new hamburger place together, and now some people are exclaiming, “omg this just mowed my lawn” and “this cured my dead granddaddy’s cancer,” but I just know a hamburger cannot do that and so I literally don’t believe what I’m hearing.

Hypothetically, if Warren’s rhetorical performance gets worse over time, it won’t change my opinion of her policies or her preparedness or my judgment of how effective she might be in office. And if Delaney gets more and more eloquent, it’s not going to change my assessment that his obsession with bipartisanship is so outmoded that he may as well have been frozen in a block of ice for 25 years.

Consider “the McConnell question.” It really blew my mind when Maddow asked it. And I think it reveals something about the awkwardness of the reality – that Mitch McConnell has acquired so much power that nobody can govern without his permission, and that he operates in bad faith and exclusively for partisan purposes – that the first two candidates who were presented with this question chose instead to revisit the topic of children being shot to death on playgrounds rather than grapple with the realpolitik. Surely, the responses to a question this pointed will be illuminating.

But they weren’t, really. I think not every candidate was even allowed to respond. (I think we did get to hear Delaney say that he’d get past McConnell through bipartisanship, which would be adorable if it weren’t dangerously naive.)

Even Warren, famous for having a plan for everything, had an uninspiring answer: liberalism can overwhelm McConnell through perseverance. Well, maybe Warren doesn’t feel like telegraphing her real plan when her enemy still has enough power to keep her from the Oval. Or maybe she has no plan yet. Or maybe that really was her plan, and the sad truth is that McConnell’s reign depends on structural facts about the federal government that no president can overcome without big majorities in Congress, i.e. without having already defeated McConnell. In any case, her answer was not great, but I don’t think it’s safe to conclude that this means she doesn’t and never will have a plan to get around McConnell.

This question addressed an important problem, nobody had a great answer, and yet I’m not prepared to disqualify anyone on the basis of their failure to articulate a fool-proof method of breaking McConnell.

So, you may say that “Castro was the big winner tonight,” but I think that just means you didn’t know much about Castro before. (For the record, neither did I.) Your statement reflects an epistemological change in you, not objective facts about the relative standings of the candidates. To the extent that two people produce similar report cards, that’s a reflection of the fact that they had similarly-sized knowledge gaps about the same candidates, which could be because they get their news from the same sources.

Lots of folks saying Warren’s “performance” was so-so, that she didn’t move up or down. Again, those statements just reflect the fact that Warren is already very widely known and her positions are generally well-understood by people who pay any attention to politics. She’s probably at peak penetration, as is Biden. The only thing that could really happen with Biden is that we discover he doesn’t have the exact same positions as Obama (which is probably true).

I see these report cards, and I think: it is not the spoon candidate that moves, it is yourself.

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Why wait? You should start digging now, don’t forget to pull the dirt back in over yourself once you’re good and deep.

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So perhaps the point of my previous post is: please don’t bother telling us which candidates you thought “did well.” It’s not useful information.

Here’s what I think would be useful:

  • If you noticed that a candidate changed their position while on stage from something they’ve previously espoused.
  • If you noticed that a candidate had a hard time sounding sincere on some topic and you suspect they’re not being honest.
  • If you hear anyone coin an excellent piece of language that might help the cause if deployed more widely. (E.g. Booker said something about “trying to jail our way out of addiction.” An effective gloss can change the public debate. This might not be a winner, but hopefully it illustrates my point.)
  • If you noticed that a candidate secretly holds some deranged ideas that managed to slip out. (Like if Delaney had casually mentioned that bipartisanship would help us finally import moon cheese, you might draw our attention to that.)

I know the candidates are on stage at the same time, often talking at the same time, sometimes in response to the same prompt. But these debates don’t work as contests, and they don’t hold up to evaluation as contests. We will all get better results if we basically imagine that each candidate is appearing by themselves, and it’s our job to scrutinize them in isolation.

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I get the frustration with the political theater, but by not voting for HRC you helped give us the asshole. If you can`t see Warren as orders of magnitude better than the narcissist in chief then I doubt anyone can change your mind.

Voltaire: “The best is the enemy of the good.”
Confucius: “Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.”
Shakespeare: “Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.”

Me: Vote for the best candidate, almost always the democrat.

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Damn skippy. If you didn’t vote for Hillary in 2016, you helped tRump win. Ryoko lost any cred they had by admitting they helped put Agent Orange in the White House.

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Those were my top three as well.

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Nobody cared. Donald is boring in his predictability.

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“… the format isn’t conducive to narrowing the field or choosing from competing goals or policies or administrators. If you were already familiar with two candidates, this kind of exercise will not help you decide which to stick with…”

Thanks. I thought I was alone in this observation. The very format was almost useless. It became a shouting match with candidates trying to be heard over the others. And the school boy Spanish was pandering.

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Michelle Goldberg’s article on Biden was interesting. She went to hear him speak on the campaign trail and was not real impressed. She admitted she was against his policies and not a fan.
Still, a lot of what she wrote has a patina of truth to it.
Google this headline: Joe Biden Doesn’t Look So Electable in Person
I know everyone has their favorite, mine used to be Warren & Klobuchar.
Now, I don’t really care who our candidate is as long as they have the ability to counter Trump and inspire a huge turnout.
I v’e dissed Biden in the past, but I will not go there anymore. Bottom line, he’s better than Trump. Personally, I don’t think Sanders or Biden will be our final candidate. Whoever it is, I’ll vote for.
Just for the hell of it, read her article. You may not like what she’s saying, but she just may be right.

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O’Rourke reminded me of the Democrats version of Marco “Robo” Rubio - clearly a guy that has starred in a mirror for hours memorizing and reciting his lines.

I guess that is all he can do since he is just a very rich white guy with no experience running a vanity campaign. He looked small and out-of-place next to the other candidates with real records of accomplishments. He probably got an “A” in his Spanish class, which is good for an English major.

Warren - Castro looked like it might be a winning ticket. Or Warren - Booker, although I worry about anybody coming out of New Jersey politics.

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It seemed, at times, chaotic with one trying to talk over out do the other. It was/is just too many. Things will get better when there are less of them. Don’t know if I’ll watch/listen tonight. I liked following the comments here to see others reactions.

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Some of us will lend a hand for that task.

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