The Dems’ December 2019 Debate

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It was the best of debates. It was the worst of debates.

The seven Democrats onstage strutted their stuff, in eloquent and even gripping terms. Every candidate made a positive impression, including the outliers Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer. Some candidates moved the audience to bursts of applause, to laughter, and perhaps to tears.

By the debate’s end, any sentient observer would have eagerly swapped any of the seven for the cruel, bumbling monster in the White House now. But the debate barely moved the needle in deciding which of the seven could best beat him.

Mainstream pundits no doubt will focus on the candidates’ clashes, of which there were several. Biden sparred with Sanders twice over “Medicare for All,” the coercion it would involve, and the cost of funding it. Biden also ventured a bit of social dominance by telling Sanders to put his hand down while Biden was speaking. Buttigieg sparred with Klobuchar over experience and with Warren over “purity tests” (Buttigieg’s words) in campaign financing, as well as Warren’s net worth (allegedly 100 times Buttigieg’s).

Pundits will search this strong brew for the tea leaves of body language and viewer persuasion. But for me the sagest observation came from Amy Walter, one of PBS’ regular political commentators, during a break. Voters, she said, don’t typically get down into the weeds of policy, let alone second-guess financial accounting. They look for shared values.

Walter implied, but didn’t quite say, that voters want a leader who seems to be on their side. Isn’t that precisely why Trump won?

If you credit Walter’s observation, then Warren probably improved her position the most. In both a long soliloquy about selfies with voters and her closing statement, Warren displayed unarguable empathy for the downtrodden in our land, of whom there are far too many.

So genuine and heartfelt seemed Warren’s emotion as to melt Buttigieg’s attacks based on campaign-financing “purity tests” like snow. Warren is not tone-deaf like Hillary Clinton, who earned big bucks from speaking to Wall Streeters behind closed doors and refused to talk about what she told them. In contrast, Warren claims to take no money at all from the well off.

Not only did Warren show bushels of empathy. She also had a simple and powerful theory why things have gotten so bad for so many: pervasive corruption. That theory fits our incumbent president like a glove.

Trump’s support is solid and invariable precisely because his voters think, as mean and cruel as he is, that he’s on their side. No matter what he says or does, he’s their champion against the corruption and unfairness of politics and the depredations of the oligarchs. (The irony of Trump claiming to be one of the oligarchs, without much evidence of that status, is lost on them.)

As moderator Tim Alberta of Politico reported, President Obama said this week that, if women were in charge, we’d see a significant improvement in just about everything. Without apparent premeditation, Warren keyed on that advice. She put her understanding and real empathy on display, along with with her razor-sharp mind.

All this raised some rather deep questions, to which I have no answer. Trump won the White House as a rough, tough crude guy—a dominant male—who claims to be the champion of the forgotten. What happens when a self-evidently caring female claims the same role, but with far greater empathy, infinitely greater honesty and decency, and a much sharper mind? Can she displace the ogre-champion in at least a few voters’ minds?

Can a nurturing female break the cycle of fear and hate with concern, love and a passel of untried and probably expensive plans? Does the answer differ for male and female voters? Can it change over time, for each individual? If so, how long does the change take? On these questions hangs the fate of the Dems in 2020 and ultimately of our Republic.

In exchanges on Afghanistan, China, national security and our endless wars against a noun (“terror”), Biden came off well. He sported his bona fides and experience to good advantage. But important as foreign policy is, it’s not going to decide the coming election. Voters are much more focused on things at home that directly affect their lives.

That’s why no House Republican voted for impeachment, despite clear evidence of Trump selling out our foreign policy for personal gain. Presumably at least some House Republicans know what their constituents care about. So Biden strutted his personal credentials but probably didn’t boost his “electability.”

Pete Buttigieg, in my view, lost ground in this debate. His complaint about Warren’s “purity tests” may have been well placed in the abstract. But his condemning her net worth was not; it came off as petty, personal and a bit peripheral. More important, Buttigieg failed to tout his experience at McKinsey as giving him a basis for controlling and managing business, having worked in the belly of the beast. That’s a point that Tom Steyer made well, based on his own much longer experience as a successful businessman, now a billionaire.

Buttigieg did show his practical and realistic side in pushing for a public option (not a command) for health insurance and a sensibly flexible approach to ending the war in Afghanistan. In that he held his ground against Klobuchar, who’s also claiming the central ground of “moderation” and realism.

As for Sanders, I think he’s fading. His dogged insistence on Medicare for All, despite its enormous costs and obvious political hurdles, made him seem increasingly doctrinaire, especially as Warren had softened her similar stance just a little bit. He joked about another candidate taking his name “in vain,” suggesting a touch of a messianic complex.

All in all, Sanders is showing increasing signs of his age and the inflexibility that comes with it. I expect him to be the first of the top five to fade, and most of his votes to go to Warren. It’s a said fate for the man who, in 2016, brought the disasters wrought by our oligarchy to the nation’s attention. But politics ain’t beanbag, and Warren is doing everything she can to avoid overt attacks on the man who first diagnosed our nation’s grave ills.

As for Klobuchar, she improved her position with credible attacks on Buttigieg (on experience) and Sanders (on health-insurance funding). She touted her experience in legislating. She forcefully advanced the importance of working together and being practical. And she credibly argued that she has the best chance of delivering the votes of her native Midwest that put Trump over the top in 2016. She’s not the brightest of the lot, nor the clearest on the details of policy, but she’s still a contender.

Politics is a strange combination of Reason and emotion, just like our species. Whether intuitively or analytically, Warren seems to understand that odd mix better than the rest. She struck no decisive blow last night and offered no stunning insight. But she seems to be making slow and steady progress toward the nomination.

Can her peculiar combination of genuine female empathy with a razor-sharp mind (dulled by a tendency to cling too long to abstract answers), prevail over a half-crazy and cruel ogre-champion of the downtrodden? That appears to be the unanswered question of last night’s debate, and of our age. Only much more careful and nuanced polling can even begin to hazard an answer before next November.

P.S. With PBS and Politico managing the debate, the Dems finally seemed to have gotten the mechanics and the process right. The moderators were tough on timing, consummately professional, and good at following up, especially PBS’ Amna Nawaz. The whole debate was available live and free of charge over the air, on various PBS stations and reportedly on MSNBC, too. And this morning, a complete, apparently human-corrected, electronically searchable transcript appeared in the Washington Post. That’s the least that Americans have a right to expect of our Fourth Estate in covering our most important election since the Civil War.

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