The first Democratic debate last night demonstrated competence, statesmanship, and class, unlike the Republican debates.
Hillary Clinton won the debate without question, and reminded us of her ability, knowledge, expertise, and experience. sorely needed in the White House to follow Barack Obama.
Only Joe Biden might be a good alternative, but whether he will get into the race seems less likely, based on the debate results.
Having said that Hillary won the debate, it must be said that Bernie Sanders showed class in making clear that enough had been said about the Clinton Email controversy, and that it was time to focus on the major issues facing the country, and who was qualified to deal with those issues.
The Kevin McCarthy admission that the Benghazi committee had been formed to undermine Hillary, rather than any belief that anything wrong had been done by her, was the nail in the coffin of those who are out to undermine Hillary’s competence to be President.
Sanders may not have won the debate, but he did far better than most Republicans have in their debates.
And Martin O’Malley also performed well, but sadly is running at the wrong time and the wrong election. He is well qualified but there is no easy way to overcome Hillary or possibly Joe Biden in this election round.
The Democrats’ top three showed why the Democrats offer a far better alternative for national leadership than the Republicans do, with their narrow minded and mean spirited attacks on immigrants, women, minorities, and the struggling middle class. And the news that 15 million watched the debate is wonderful, although it does not match 20-25 million who watched the GOP debates. But remember it is Donald Trump that caused such large audiences to watch in those two debates.
As long as the GOP allows its extreme elements to control events in Congress and in the Presidential race, they are doomed to ultimate defeat in November 2016!
This is a montage here from the debate last night. Bernie Sanders, Hillary, Lincoln Chafee, and they’re all talking about all the free stuff. College and health care and whatever you want. If you’re an illegal immigrant, it’s all yours. All you have to do is show up.
SANDERS: “Make every public college and university in this country tuition-free.â€
HILLARY: “Anyone to go to a public college or university tuition-free.â€
SANDERS: “We’re all gonna have medical and family paid leave.â€
HILLARY: “Make sure every child gets health care, including undocumented children and others.â€
CHAFEE: “Funding education, funding infrastructure, funding health care.â€
HILLARY: “Enhance the benefits for the poorest recipients of Social Security.â€
SANDERS: “We should be putting money into education. I want Wall Street now to help kids in this country go to college, public colleges and universities.â€
HILLARY: “I know we can afford it because we’re gonna make the wealthy pay for it.â€
“We can afford it ’cause we’re gonna make the wealthy pay.†We are $18 trillion in debt. Now, you can afford anything if you ignore that, if you don’t think that’s a problem, if that number is irrelevant, and that the money never has to even be serviced or paid back, then of course you can afford anything. Santa Claus is coming to town…
Here is another montage of the Media talking about how great Hillary was. She was so good that it’s just too late for Joe Biden to even bother.
BLITZER: Joe Biden, the vice president, may have missed his chance.
DANIEL HALPER: Maybe we don’t need Joe Biden.
KRISTEN WELKER: If Vice President Biden was looking for a clear opening into the race last night, he didn’t get it.
JOHN DICKERSON: We’re talking about her performance and not the huge vacuum in the race to be filled by a white knight like Joe Biden.
VAN JONES: If I’m Biden, I don’t see any way to get on the stage.
KYLE KONDIK: I don’t know if Joe Biden saw anything last night that would suggest that his presence is needed.
GLORIA BORGER: I don’t see where his different lane is.
JONATHAN KARL: There is a sense that his moment has passed.
DENNIS KUCINICH: America loves Joe Biden, but I don’t know where the opening is.
Right, because they got rid of every scandal. She was exonerated, Benghazi, e-mails. She was applauded, exonerated and pardoned by her own party last night. Well, there’s no reason for Biden to get in because there’s no problem that needs solved and there’s nothing the Democrat Party needs to be saved from. So, Joe, don’t worry about it. You don’t have to get dressed as often anymore.
It was made abundantly clear last night that the Bernie Sanders campaign, whatever it was or whatever it is going to remain going forward, is nothing more than a show campaign designed to make it look like Hillary is overcoming something, so that when she gets the nomination it does not appear to be a coronation, like she has won some sort of a tough battle.
Ariel. I think you seriously need a mental evaluation from a psychologist and a psychiatrist.
You have a lot of hate inside you, needing to be let out, so you can be happy, and medication seems necessary!
They’re still fighting the Iraq war in the Democrat Party. They’re acting like the last seven years have not happened. They are campaigning as though George W. Bush is still president, like we’re still in Iraq. All of this talk about how bad things are and how much they need to improve and how these are the people to do it ignores the fact that things are bad because they are running the show and have been for seven years. I was amazed at how cavalierly they approached that. The last seven years have not had Republican fingerprints on hardly anything by design. The Republican Party has morphed into invisibility for all intents and purposes because they’re still afraid of upsetting the independents.
Also, if you listen to these people last night there’s no health care. We still don’t have health care. We don’t have health insurance. We don’t have anything for the poor, and last night the Democrats demanded health care and health insurance free for illegal immigrants, and then they demanded free college tuition that the rich are gonna pay for because the rich aren’t paying enough now. I heard it all. There was not a single shred of anything new from these people last night.
Good grief Ronald, I am just repeating what they said!! LOL
Bernie’s living in like a time warp where Denmark was something that it isn’t anymore. Bernie doesn’t know that Denmark has reduced the size of its welfare state significantly. Denmark long ago… They’re only six million people anyway, so you can’t compare a population of six million people to one 300-plus million. But Denmark realized they had overextended on their welfare state, and they’re in the process of dialing it back and rolling it back. And Denmark, by the way, is telling these immigrants from Syria and these refugees, “Nope, not here. Go to Germany. Angela Merkel wants you; we don’t. We don’t have any room for you.”
The most idiotic phrase of the night, even surpassing Chafee. Hillary: “It’s always the Republicans or their sympathizers who say, “You can’t have paid leave, you can’t provide healthcare.†They don’t mind having Big Government to interfere with a woman’s right to choose and to try to take down Planned Parenthood. They’re fine with Big Government when it comes to that. I’M SICK OF IT! You know, we can do these things! We should not be paralyzed by the Republicans and their constant refrain, “big government this, big government that,†except for what THEY want to impose on the American people. I know we can afford it because we’re going to make the wealthy pay for it. That is the way to get it done!” First of all, no one is taking down planned parenthood! We just want to eliminated the subsidies! Eliminating subsidies of $500 million is NOT A BIG GOVERNMENT POLICY, QUITE THE CONTRARY ! Second, if PP survives in the private sector without government subsidies, so be it! After all PP has over $1.5 Billion in private revenue. And if PP doesn’t survive , so be it! And no one is cutting $500 million from womens healthcare, it is just being REASSIGNED to other health providers for women services. SO ELIMINATING A SUBSIDY IS NOT A BIG GOVERNMENT POLICY!!!! Only an idiotic Hillary could think like that!
I watched the debates of the five Democratic presidential candidates (thus far).
I think we can write off former Virginia U.S. senator Jim Webb immediately.
A couple minutes later, you can do the same with former Rhode Island governor and ex-U.S. senator Lincoln Chafee. (No impact from either of them.)
With ex-Maryland governor Martin O’Malley…he has been underperforming on the Democratic side like Ohio governor John Kasich has on the Republican side. (It’s like the sports analogy: “On paper…”)
I don’t consider U.S. vice president Joe Biden a candidate. (A serious presidential candidate would have jumped in the race already.)
As we had suspected long ago, this comes down to former First Lady, ex-New York U.S. senator, and 47th U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont U.S. senator Bernie Sanders.
I think the Corporate News Media will continue to bury headlines showing Sanders’ populism message catching on while Clinton, despite the manufactured Theatre of the Absurd-type scandals (by Republicans), will be the preferred candidate by “pragmatic” Democratic primary/caucus and Wall Street-type voters. (She can easily carry 35 to 40 states, at a minimum, en route to the party’s nomination for 2016. That is…unless a major shift moves to Sanders. That would blow the minds of the beltway establishment hacks and the naysayers who incessantly talk “electability.” In other words, that they remain stuck in the past with regard to exactly where so much of this country’s electorate is at here in the mid-2010s.)
Rewrite of a sentence:
As we had suspected long ago, this comes down to former First Lady, ex-New York U.S. senator, and [67th] U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont U.S. senator Bernie Sanders.
Jim Webb Is an American Hero, But Democrats Aren’t Interested in him. When Democratic party presidential hopefuls were asked to list the enemies they have made during their careers that they are most proud of, the only candidate who didn’t include any fellow Americans was Jim Webb. Webb — who, it should be noted, didn’t exactly answer the question — explained that it was an enemy soldier who once threw a grenade and wounded him, a soldier who is no longer around. Jim Webb killed a Commie because Jim Webb loves America. Many liberals on social media found this revelation sorta creepy. Yet there was probably a time when liberal voters would have been impressed by someone who served his country so valiantly. They might have seen promise in a candidate whose populist sensibilities could speak convincingly to the working class and to Southerners and whose appeal could be propelled by both idealism and realism. Webb might have been a formidable Democratic presidential candidate 15 years ago. Twenty-five years ago, he might have been a star. Today? He’s a man completely out of touch with the philosophical temperament of his party. Webb may have fought in a war against collectivist authoritarians, but today he’s debating one — a less threatening socialist who regularly lectures thousands of excitable sycophants about the need for more coercion and redistribution. This would have been anathema even for Barack Obama in 2008. Bernie Sanders is not stigmatized by his ideology. Today there’s almost no genuine philosophical daylight between Sanders’s ideas and the professed positions of front-runner Hillary Clinton. Their disagreement is over what’s achievable. Yet Beltway wisdom tells us that only one party has been radicalized in America. Democrats are the adults.
Webb detests politics just like the rest of us. You can see it in his eyes. He hates campaigning. He doesn’t like raising money. In the debate, Webb exhibited contempt for the bunkum that poured from mouths of people who can claim that climate change is the most pressing problem mankind faces. And I have little doubt he would have been similarly unimpressed by most of the platitudinous answers Republicans offered in their debates.
First, my friends and I are back from our trip.
Now, our opinion of the debate:
We thought that it was an exceptional debate. Hillary and Bernie were in fine form. The other three candidates did well but were more intimidated by the scope of this debate. However, it was first class all the way. Strong candidates.
LOL! We’ve come back to find, that, our troll, as usual, is off his meds!
Amen to that Professor!
Edited for additions:
I second that Rustbelt! The Democrats overall were infinitely superior – serious, sane, sober, substantive – to the far-right-wing, radical, xenophobic, homophobic, warmongering, fearmongering Republicans. And no, that wasn’t meant as a backhanded compliment.
The conceited liberal ego is a fascinating monster to observe.
The conceited conservative ego is a fascinating monster to observe.
LOL! Good one Rustbelt!
Progressive liberalism is forged in envy, hypocritically administered, generates poverty and destroys wealth.
Conservatism is forged in envy, hypocritically administered, generates poverty and destroys wealth.
LOL! Rustbelt! You got me on the floor laughing hysterically!
Having been educated a progressive liberal Democrat is like having been bottle fed with alcohol.
Socialism and progressivism are just other names for demagoguery.
LOL! He’s copying and pasting some of his nonsense over here! LOL! Hilarious!