Jon Margolis is a political columnist for VTDigger.
Featuring (if it featured anything) a mini-squabble between Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Tuesday’s Democratic presidential debate posed a question of historic significance: Is the triumph of Donald Trump so complete that all of American politics is now a reality TV show?
Consider the subject of the min-squabble: Did Sanders really tell Warren in a private 2018 meeting that “a woman can’t win” a presidential election?
Then take note of what Warren said about it. “Look at the men on this stage. Collectively, they have lost 10 elections. The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they’ve been in are the women: Amy (Klobuchar) and me. And the only person on this stage who has beaten an incumbent Republican anytime in the past 30 years is me.”
The subject has absolutely nothing to do with how the country should be governed. Warren’s statement was accurate, kind of funny, and meaningless.
And yet this subject and this statement were what the talking heads were discussing on cable TV after the debate ended and were the focus of most of the news coverage Wednesday morning.
Granted, it was a bland debate, with the candidates repeating what they had said in all the earlier forums, not disagreeing too much except over health care. Again.
Still, there was some substantive discussion about public policy, about whether rich kids should pay tuition at public colleges, about improving services for young children, about how the proposals by some of the candidates would be paid for.
And perhaps most important, a short but substantive debate about how and when military force should be used.
All effectively ignored in the post-debate analysis. Maybe because what’s important is not how the country should be governed, or even what is politically meaningful, but what’s boffo on reality TV. Score another one for Trump.
Among the chatterers, there was something close to consensus that Warren had won and Sanders lost their short discussion over sexism. There was less consensus about whether she had diminished or expanded that victory when she did not shake Sanders’ outstretched hand during what seemed to be a tense, short, post-debate conversation.
If Warren did “win,” she had some help. The first question on the subject went to Sanders, who was asked why he had told Warren that a woman could not get elected president.
“As a matter of fact, I didn’t say it,” Sanders said.
Properly, the reporter pressed him. “You’re saying that you never told Sen. Warren that a woman could not win the election?
“That is correct,” Sander said.
At which point the questioner – the usually sharp and capable CNN correspondent Abby Phillip – turned to Warren and said, “Senator Warren, what did you think when Senator Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?”
Phillip was effectively saying Warren was accurate and Sanders was lying about their long-ago conversation. There was no way Sanders could recover from that. And there was no need for Warren to try to “prove” that Sanders had said it. The wording of the questions won that part of the debate for her.
No, there is no reason to suspect that Abby Phillip is out to get Bernie Sanders or nominate Elizabeth Warren. A lot of debate moderation is improvised. That was the question that occurred to her at that moment.
But Warren’s apparent “victory” over Sanders raises an intriguing possibility, one to which one of the TV commentators alluded: might she have engineered the whole flap?
It started Sunday when CNN posted a story with a headline saying Sanders had told Warren “that a woman can’t win, sources say.” The article cited four sources, “two people Warren spoke with directly soon after the encounter, and two people familiar with the meeting.”
Enter here another relatively recent wrinkle in the political process – news organizations attacking one another for coverage one side or the other deems unfair. The aggrieved party in this was the leftish media watchdog group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), which called the CNN story “journalistically shoddy” and “an anonymously sourced hit piece.”
But the story was true, meaning it wasn’t shoddy.
Not necessarily true in that Sanders had made that remark. But true in that Warren was claiming he’d made it. She later confirmed that this is what Sanders had told her, or at least how she had interpreted what he had told her.
The “anonymously sourced” part is correct, but this is politics, not national security or criminal investigation. A story reporting that Sen. Jones is under suspicion of child molestation should identify at least one source by name and position. If the story is about whether Sen. Jones is going to run for re-election or run for president, anonymous sources are fine if the reporter knows the sources to be responsible and informed. A great deal of political news is essentially gossip. A political reporter who refused to use anonymous sources would pass up a lot of good stories.
Three mysteries remain, starting with whether Sanders really said a woman couldn’t win. It doesn’t seem likely. It’s inconsistent with what he has said in the past and it would have been foolish to say it to Warren.
Then there’s the question of whether it’s true. That doesn’t seem likely, either. Hillary Clinton got more votes for president than anyone ever except Barack Obama in 2008. Polls indicate that only a small minority would not vote for a woman nominee. And most of them probably wouldn’t vote for a Democrat anyway. A woman candidate both loses and gets some votes just for being a woman. The net outcome appears to be a wash.
Finally, are the talking heads right that Warren had a good night and Sanders lost ground? Or, alternatively, is the journalistic establishment more focused on “identity” issues and on boffo performances than the Iowa electorate?
Patience. Answers coming the night of Feb. 3.
