Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
Bernie who?
After a Democratic candidate debate that seemed interminable (it was only three hours), nobody was talking about Sen. Bernie Sanders.
For Sanders, that wasn’t so bad. Everybody was talking about Julian Castro, and that talk might signal the end of his campaign, as if anyone will notice.
“Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago,” Castro asked Joe Biden early in the debate. “Are you forgetting already what you said just two minutes ago? I mean, I can’t believe that you said two minutes ago that they had to buy in and now you’re saying they don’t have to buy in. You’re forgetting that.”
Forget the buying in part; that had to do with Biden’s health care plan. What Castro was doing was raising the question of whether the former vice president, at 76, was losing it.
Not here, he wasn’t. Castro was (deliberately?) misinterpreting a common phrase to suggest that Biden’s plan would put the burden on individual citizens to “buy” a health care plan. What Biden had actually said was, “Anyone who can’t afford it gets automatically enrolled in the Medicare-type option we have.” If anyone was confused, it was Castro. He’s 44, and hasn’t yet learned the difference between being tough and being nasty.
Happily for the Democrats, Castro was not the only topic of discussion. So was Biden, stronger and feistier than in the two earlier debates. So were Sens. Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke. None of them had the kind of dramatic “break-out moment” (already one of this year’s political clichés) that would vault them into the top tier as measured by the polls. But they all acquitted themselves well. So did Sen. Elizabeth Warren and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
But then they always do.
In fact, except for Castro and Andrew Yang (who, like author Marianne Williamson, isn’t really running for president, whether or not he knows that) all the candidates did well. This was the first of the debates after which Democrats can be confident that the real winner wasn’t Donald Trump.
It wasn’t really anyone. Biden won the first hour. He was vigorous. He was graceful. He was steadfast in insisting that under his health care proposal, “the 160 million people who like their health care now, they can keep it.” He kept flashing that smile which reminds people why they like him.
But Biden grew noticeably more tired and less articulate as the evening wore on, at one point offering a truly bizarre and incoherent answer to a question about racial injustice by saying parents should “make sure you have the record player on at night … make sure that kids hear words, a kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.”
Harris had most of the best lines, likening Trump to “a really small dude,” and during one tiff among Biden, Harris and Warren over health care noting that “this discussion is giving Americans a headache.” But she didn’t stand out any more than did O’Rourke, Booker or Klobuchar.
Throughout the debate, Sanders was neither inconsequential nor irrelevant. He was right in the thick of it for a while, and by the end, he had spoken more than anyone except Biden, Warren and Booker. But most of his 13 minutes and 55 seconds came in the first 40 minutes, during the contentious squabble over health care policy. After that, he had less to say.
As usual, he said it well, and he said it shouting. He may have been a bit hoarse, but this is Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s very consistent, very stalwart, dependably loud self-described “democratic socialist.”
Who seems still not to understand what democratic socialism is. When the subject came up, he cited what he called the democratic socialism of Canada and the Scandinavian countries. They all have capitalist economies.
But as most Vermonters seem to know, factual accuracy has never been their junior senator’s strong suit, a trait he displayed a few times Thursday, such as when he said the United States is “spending twice as much per capita on health care as Canada or any other major country on earth.”
The United States spends substantially more per capita on health care than all other prosperous countries. But not twice as much.
No matter. It was not the only factual error of the night. Booker was wrong when he said, “we have more African Americans under criminal supervision today than all the slaves in 1850.” Besides, political campaigns rarely rise or fall because a candidate misstates some facts.
Nobody’s candidacy is likely to rise or fall as a result of this debate, at least to the extent that rising and falling is measured by the polls. Sanders no doubt did well enough to hold onto his hardcore base of support. His problem is that so far he has not figured out how to broaden that base, and there’s no reason to think anything he did Thursday will help him do that.
In fact, there’s no reason to think the debate will have much impact on the polls at all. Expect the next round of polls to show – as usual – that Biden is in front, followed by Sanders and Warren, or perhaps Warren and Sanders, with everybody else well behind.
Right now, though, the polls are almost if not entirely meaningless, even when they aren’t confusing, like the two most recent New Hampshire surveys, both by reputable firms. One has Sanders vaulting into the lead, with 29% to Biden’s 21. The other has Sanders falling to third.
One of them is wrong.
