Iowa’s debate featured a small group of candidates just weeks before the caucus and in the midst of some real campaign drama.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1284560
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1284560
I thought the highlight of the debate was that I didn’t watch it. With the time I gained I did nothing … 'cept maybe have a *beer.
It doesn’t matter anymore. Whoever the Dem candidate is, I’m voting for them.
*The Emperor Of Bottled Beers™
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Biden is still struggling with his yes vote on the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He said it was a mistake, then reminded everyone for the umpteenth time that Barack Obama chose him as vice president. He needs to find a way to weave in things he’s been right about in regards to wartime to blunt the impact of that vote.
I’d love to hear something like “look, I was wrong at the time; a lot of other folks of good will and sound judgement were wrong. I have learned from my mistake. I hope others have learned, too.”
And then get on with it. Because it’s crystal clear that the alternative, namely the Pompeo-type jokers who are currently running the show, have learned less than zero.
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Agreed. Trump has made himself the GOP’s Hillary. He turns off people in such a negative way that he’ll never be able to reach them again. He’ll bring out our base in droves and insure that what’s left of the decent Republicans joins us, too.
But I’d still like to see Booker, Castro and Harris back on the trail because we all know one of them is going to be the VP nominee. Their voices were missed tonight.
While our white candidates can speak to diversity, they don’t exhibit the passion and hunger a large part of our base longs to see. The DNC needs to correct the mistake it made in putting together the rules for how one had to qualify by getting rid of those billionaires and helping fund the candidates they choked off.
After Iowa, I want to see our field opened up wide again with everyone back on the road. See which candidates have the best chemistry with each other instead of all this knit picking of each other’s plans which are essentially the same anyways.
Personalities and character are what we need to run on against Trump and we have loads of it to spare if we don’t stifle all wings of our party.
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As Pete pointed out tonight, most of the troops he served with don’t remember how the Iraqi War started. The subject is moot to everyone but the corporate media who apparently forgets it was embedded right up Cheney’s *ss and have a lot more to answer for than the Senators who voted back then to give W leeway so close after 911.
The only thing most voters are going to remember on election day is that WW III almost happened on Trump’s watch with all those missiles coming toward our troops and Donald not retaliating back. The chicken hawk assassin blinked or more appropriately hid for five hours during the rockets’ red glare. And then said “All is well”? His supporters still can’t believe it.
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Watched for about 30 min or so and none of the candidates were at their best. This debate will not change anything. Bernie seemed a bit frail to me and his response to Liz Warren wrt unseating a Republican incumbent was just dumb.
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Disagree. Republicans win on personality. Democrats win on policy. Hillary ran a bad campaign and won by over 3 million votes, and would have won the election with three midwest states that need better policies. Had she focused on job training instead of not being Trump, she’d have won.
The biggest mistake we can make is to obsess over who we pick. The media wants them to duke it out with a clownshow because that’s better for ratings, but we need to focus on the boring stuff; like what we’ll do once Trump’s gone. After four years of Trump, boring will be sweet relief.
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Didn’t watch in real time (got caught up in the Lev Parnas docs), but watched most of it on replay.
The debate was like a PBS/NPR debate from yesteryear, which I kinda appreciated. Questions were pretty substantive and largely devoid of cheap gotcha stuff. It was run like a national debate about national issues. It was a far cry from the debates in the summer and early fall when it was all about style over substance. Tonight was all about substance. We’ve sobered up after impeachment and Iran.
I viewed this debate as a Biden vs Bernie debate. The rest were filler. They’re the top 2 contenders for the nomination. No one else really matters until one of the others can knock the top two out, and there’s little indication of that at this point. On that count, Biden won pretty much going away.
He was very substantive, self-assured and visionary on foreign policy. He balanced it with knowledge and detail. He brings confidence. Bernie was nowhere near as good. His knowledge of foreign policy is limited and it shows.
Biden was also crisp on health care and his position aligns to what’s popular in the country and what Dems have been winning on in the Trump era. Bernie’s single payer is a loser nationally from the perspective of purple and red state Dems. Bernie basically avoided questions on how he would pay for his single payer plan and his other spending plans. Of course, Berners online are whining that the debate was rigged against them, but that’s just ol’ Bernie not liking any scrutiny. You can’t propose trillions of dollars of spending and not expect scrutiny, especially when the DMR poll dubs you the top dawg. He’s very good at sparring and avoiding scrutiny, but these two moderators had a no nonsense attitude and put him on the spot more than others have been able to do so.
In addition, Biden was very solid on trade and his views align to where Americans are, especially suburban America which will be the engine of our victory this fall. Bernie is reflexively isolationist and it especially shows on trade. As Biden remarked, there really is no trade deal that Bernie will support.
Moreover, Biden made no major mistakes. No one attacked him. No one tagged him. Sanders, on the other hand, got the short end of the stick on his two exchanges with Warren over whether ‘a woman can win’. He got himself in such a mess on those two exchanges that he had to invoke Hillary Clinton’s name through clenched teeth not once, but twice, to show that he’s not a sexist. You know what that means? The audience knows he messed up and he was self conscious about his campaign’s troubled history with misogyny so he was defensive (a rare occurrence for Bernie). Despite what Berners will tell you, Warren got the better of that exchange because more people believed her and more people agreed with her answer to the question of whether a woman can win.
All of that points to solid Biden win. In fact, with foreign policy and our national crisis dominating in them minds of voters, I’d say this is a pretty decisive win for him in terms of consolidating more of the center left vote behind him.
For Bernie, I think he showed that he will struggle to build coalitions. While he has a solid 19% to 20%, I think he will struggle to add to that vote to get a plurality to win these early contests. Very little that he did tonight helped his case.
The other candidates:
Warren - I give her props for how she handled her two exchanges with Bernie, but on the issues she was substantively lacking on foreign policy and trade, and health care is now a net minus for her. Child care issue was decent. She continues to drive everything to corporate regulation and corruption, but that’s the wrong diagnosis for the issues we have today. Warren is not a leader any more on major issues that drive this electorate or the national debate. It was a much better performance for her than the last two debates, but with Biden dominating foreign policy fewer people see her as a CiC. What she did today is to damage Bernie pretty badly. Bernie compounded those mistakes.
Pete - Mr. Ted Talk talked. Listening to Pete is like reading a Dan Brown novel. Presentation is good. It sounds well thought through and then it gets pretty superficial and wafer thin when you dig a little deeper. I don’t feel he made an impact. He was inoffensive. He’s a bright guy who name dropped all 10 of his black friends but, no, he’s not going to be the nominee and his candidacy has been more of a media creation than anything else.
Amy Klobuchar - Did a good job running to be Joe’s VP. She’d be a good Deputy President. She has a lot of good ideas and a decent ability to articulate on complex issues. She’s not going to be the nominee and she has no lane in this race. It’s Joe’s lane. All of her votes on caucus day will go to Biden and that will probably put him over the top in IA.
Tom Steyer - His term limits idea is stupid and at odds with what the nation’s priorities are, but he was otherwise pretty good and substantive. Bloomberg would have more heft if he were up there (probably a good thing for Joe that he isn’t).
I would be remiss if I didn’t note the absence of POC candidates or that je ne sais quoi “pizzazz”. It’s not the same without Harris, Booker or Castro and it is less interesting, but it is what it is. White voters wanted a whites only primary and that’s what they got.
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Joe Biden’s campaign is going to be a noun, a verb and “Barack Obama”.
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Joe Biden’s campaign is going to be a noun, a verb and “Barack Obama”.
It appears to be his lifeline more and more. Can understand now why Obama won’t endorse him.
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I was OK with Amy talking over the moderators - there were only six on stage, let them talk a bit.
Steyer and Bloomberg are running ads during Boston Bruins games, I don’t recall anyone else on TV at this point. I agree with @khyber900 that term limits is a terrible policy and one that does not resonate with Democratic voters.
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Joe Biden’s answer on why he voted for the Iraq War was terrible. But in fairness there is no good answer to that question. He showed very poor judgment. Remember, Dems are 0-2 with nominees who voted for the Iraq War. We really really can’t afford to go 0-3.
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I thought Warren won last night’s debate. I wouldn’t have any problem with her understanding and handling tough issues. Her pivot away from the potential “he said, she said” food fight was masterful.
Biden lost last night. He seems befuddled and tired.
Mayor Pete sounds more like a John Edwards redux every time I hear him. Glib but not much substance.
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It seemed to me the big losers last night were the moderators, cnn, and the DNC for running the debate on cable as opposed to free over the air tv.
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I thought Warren’s “letting” Bernie imply she was lying was tactically brilliant. She got him to perform the overbearing mansplainer right in front of everyone, while she took the moral high ground.
When you mansplain that a woman misunderstands sexism you are losing, and when you mansplain that Warren misunderstands anything you have made a mistake.
Please proceed, senator from Vermont.
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Bidens Iraq vote shows how complex, messy, and morally compromised intelligence gathering and application can be - it also shows the same about foreign wars. It also feeds right into the deep state fears that team Trump has been stoking.
I like the fact that Warren is showing that she can fight rough. What she is doing to Bernie is totally unfair - how can you prove or disprove a private conversation - but I don’t care. Politics in 2020 is not fair. I still don’t like her politics and find it hard to stomach voting for her, but existential issues like climate change and Iran remind me that economic policy isn’t everything.
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I’ll win the Mega Millions lottery before Biden apologizes or admits he was wrong.
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Possible, I however live in East TN and am hearing folks complain about the high cost of medical care. Therefore, I believe, that single payer can be a winner, even here, That is if the emphasis is placed squarely on the gorging of the HC Corps of HC funding. Use the recent report that contrasts Canada and the US, where the US spends 4 times what Canadians do for poorer results. Where 34% of cost in the US are directly attributed to overhead while in Canada it is 4+%. See The U.S. Spends $2,500 Per Person on Health Care Administrative Costs. Canada Spends $550. Here's Why. | TIME The story details how the U.S. Spends $2,500 per person on Health Care Administrative Costs . Canada spends $550. Jan 6, 2020
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A better speechwriter than me could spin some sort of sound bite as “when the executive branch said the intelligence was good, you used to believe them. That’s how President Obama and I ran the country, and that’s how I’ll run the country again”.
But with gooder (or stronger!) words because I’m an engineer, not a speechwriter.
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I agree that would be a reasonable answer if all of the Dems in the Senate voted for the Iraq War as well. Unfortunately for Biden, 20 of them were able to see through the bullshit and had the good sense to vote against it. Personally, I suspect/fear the real reason Biden voted for the war was because he wanted pundits like Tim Russert and Chris Matthews to say he was “strong” on national security.
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