The second night of the second Democratic Presidential debate in Detroit, Michigan, saw former Vice President Joe Biden survive an onslaught from Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Bill de Blasio.
At the same time, Harris remained a major competitor, although attacked by Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard on her handling of criminal justice as California Attorney General.
Cory Booker gained a great deal from this debate as well, and Julian Castro and Jay Inslee both improved their status.
Overall, this debate was far better than Tuesday night’s debate, and it is certain that the 20 debaters will decline by up to half the total for the Houston debate on ABC on September 12 and 13.
Some of these 20 contenders, even if they did well, will be unable to gain 130,000 unique contributors and 2 percent in at least 4 polls, the requirements for the third set of debates.
Right now, the following are definite:
Joe Biden
Kamala Harris
Bernie Sanders
Elizabeth Warren
Pete Buttigieg
The following have a good opportunity to move forward as well:
Cory Booker
Julian Castro
Amy Klobuchar
Jay Inslee
Beto O’Rourke
Steve Bullock
So a total of 11 candidates are likely in September in Houston, and since there will likely be only 11, they may all be on one evening.
Martin Longman expresses my fears of the center vs. left battle perfectly.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/07/31/the-democratic-debates-are-not-helping-the-partys-cause/
I tuned in a bit last night and was not impressed. Lawrence nailed the debates. It was like a game show. It was very clear that CNN wanted drama and sensationalism just to try to boost their ratings. The moderators turned it into a grudge match. In these debates, we want to listen to intelligent discussions, not attacks and attempts to tear down others.
Also agree with the MSNBC panel. Attacking Obama instead of attacking Trump was a dumb idea.
Michael Moore was interviewed on MSNBC. Says to stop trying to pursue the angry white men who deflected to Trump. Says the ones to pursue are women, people of color, and young people. He thinks that Biden, Warren, Sanders, and Harris have the best chance of beating Trump, but, that Michelle Obama would crush Trump if she were running.
Agreed about CNN. They did a horrible job. ABC is doing the September debate. I hope they do a better job than CNN.
Agreed about the Obama bashing. The man has 97% approval rating from Democrats and many consider him one of our better presidents-including me. The ACA was a building block on the road to insuring more American-it was never the end all. Start talking about your plans rather than bashing his. Have really bad feeling that next year will be Kerry 2004 all over again, when the POTUS was an idiot but Dems couldn’t get behind their candidate.
Part of the problem was Jake Tapper, using Republican framed questions to start the fights.
Democrats Aren’t Addressing the Biggest Challenge We Face
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/08/01/democrats-arent-addressing-the-biggest-challenge-we-face/
During Tuesday night’s debate, there was a discussion about the need for common-sense gun control. After several candidates blamed the NRA and the influence of big money in politics, Pete Buttigieg responded with this.
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[This is] the conversation that we have been having for the last 20 years. Of course we need to get money out of politics, but when I propose the actual structural democratic reforms that might make a difference — end the electoral college, amend the Constitution if necessary to clear up Citizens United, have D.C. actually be a state, and depoliticize the Supreme Court with structural reform — people look at me funny, as if this country was incapable of structural reform.
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Following that debate, Ezra Klein wrote that the mayor gave “the single most important answer†of the night.
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The reality is Democrats are debating ever-more ambitious policy in a political system ever-less capable of passing ambitious policy — and ever-more stacked against their policies, in particular…Policy isn’t the Democrats’ problem. They’ve got plenty of plans. Some of them are even popular. What they don’t have is a political system in which they can pass and implement those plans…The hope that you can pass laws through bipartisan compromise is dead. And that means governance is consistently, reliably failing to solve people’s problems, which is in turn radicalizing them against government itself.
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Klein identifies the biggest challenge Democrats face that almost no one is talking about. Even if climate change is the existential threat of our lifetimes, not much can get done about it given our current political system. That will remain true no matter who wins the presidential election in 2020. So Democrats beat each other up over whether or not they support things like the Green New Deal when all any plan amounts to is a bunch of words on a piece of paper.
The problem Klein misses is that all of the structural reforms mentioned by Buttigieg are also destined for failure because they would have to pass through the same political system. Amending the Constitution to eliminate Citizens United faces an even steeper uphill battle.
The answers candidates gave to this problem over the two nights of debates indicate to me that they haven’t been paying attention to how things have changed over the last decade. On one end of a continuum, you have those who promise to unite the country. While that alone is suspect, we also have to ask what difference it would make if the political divide wasn’t so enormous. Mitch McConnell and the Republicans made it clear long ago that, as Zachary Roth put it, “being outnumbered doesn’t mean losing.â€
Almost everything the majority leader does is wildly unpopular with voters. But he’s figured out a few things that Democrats haven’t grappled with yet, which is how to break our political system so that it doesn’t work anymore. Martin Longman did a good job of describing how he’s done that. In the meantime, McConnell is busy stacking the courts so that conservatives can legislate from the bench, meaning that no matter how united we are, voters don’t have a voice. Republicans also have Fox News and the rest of the right-wing propaganda machine to ensure that at least part of the population is either indoctrinated or confused about what is happening.
As Klein wrote, all of that is radicalizing voters against government itself, which is what Mike Lofgren pointed out eight years ago.
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A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.
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On the other end of the continuum are those candidates who promise to fight. Frankly, I’m not even sure what that means. But at its root, it is a solution that might be even more naive that the one proposed by the uniters because it assumes that Mitch McConnell and Republicans will back down if Democrats present their agenda with strength and persistence. But what that ignores is the fact that a broken political system is working for Republicans. Until that is no longer the case, Democrats can fight for their agenda as fiercely as is humanly possible and it won’t change a thing.
Instead of tackling this issue, many Democrats are doing things that actually feed into the problem. The first, as Longman pointed out, is that some of them seem to be in a competition for who can propose the most bold agenda. The more they hype the possibilities without addressing this challenge, the more they set the public up for disappointment, cynicism, and the kind of radicalization against government Klein talked about.
Another position taken by some Democrats is even more damaging. It happens when they join with the media’s favorite narrative about how “both sides do it.†We heard this from several candidates during the debate when, in service of their bold ideas, they cast our current situation as a failure of both parties.
No one has to suggest that Obamacare solved all of the problems with health care or that rejoining the Paris climate accord is sufficient. But a failure to call out Republicans for their blatant attempts to break our political system while dismissing the progress Democrats have been able to achieve only exacerbates the problem, not to mention the fact that it comes close to inferring something similar to Trump’s “I alone can fix this.†Like it or not, politics is a team sport and when players are constantly pointing to the inadequacies of others on their team, it is a losing strategy.
Frankly, there aren’t any easy answers to the problem Klein described so well. The one thing Buttigieg has going for him is that at least he’s talking about it and offering potential solutions, even if they aren’t realistic in the current environment. We need to start somewhere.
Contrary to what a lot of people suggest, Barack Obama was keenly aware of what was happening during his presidency and adopted a series of strategies to address the problem. They all met limited success. If one of the most gifted politicians of our time had trouble breaking through, that tells you something about the difficulty of the challenge we face and the inadequacy of the current rhetoric about how to address it.
As a starting point, Democrats need to do an accurate analysis of what’s happening and abandon the notion that uniting or fighting will fix things. From there, it is imperative that they find a way to communicate how our political system is broken and be clear about who is responsible. Kamala Harris often talks about the need to speak the truth—especially when it’s hard. She and the other Democratic candidates could start with this one.
DEBATE NIGHT #02: THE PERFORMANCES
Location: Detroit, Michigan
Date: July 31, 2019
All, while categorized, are listed in alphabetical order.
TIER #01
• Tulsi Gabbard
• Andrew Yang
TIER #02
• Joe Biden
• Cory Booker
• Julián Castro
• Bill de Blasio
TIER #03
• Michael Bennet
• Kirsten Gillibrand
• Kamala Harris
• Jay Inslee
Video Compilation #01:
https://youtu.be/WMT5-C3igZ4
Video Compilation #02:
https://youtu.be/M97zgXh89jM
This nails it for me!
The sooner we can cut the number of candidates on the debate stage, the better it will be.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/8/1/1875884/-The-sooner-we-can-cut-the-number-of-candidates-on-the-debate-stage-the-better-it-will-be
The presidential debates wasted too much time talking about stuff only Congress can do.
https://www.vox.com/2019/8/1/20750150/democratic-debate-cnn-medicare-for-all-kamala-harris-joe-biden-presidential-power
While I strongly oppose Gabbard for many reasons, I do think she improved upon her performance in the previous debate, but I wouldn’t put her in the top tier.
New York Times: Only 7 Candidates Have Qualified for the Next Democratic Debate
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/us/politics/next-democratic-debate.html?emc=rss&partner=rss&smid=tw-nytpolitics&smtyp=cur
They are:
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey
Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind.
Senator Kamala Harris of California
Former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts
I say have the cutoff be 10 people. No more than that.
Klobouchar, Castro, and Yang are close to reaching the criteria for the next debate. Klobouchar needs 10,000 more donors and Castro and Yang each need 1 more poll.
Saw an ad on TV last night that Trump has put out, smearing the Democratic Party as “socialists”.
Michael Moore may well have been right, insofar as on an alternate earth, Michelle Obama would make a wonderful candidate. But on this one, she would never run and has said so often.
Klobuchar makes 8 now for the September debates.
The number of House Democrats in favor of impeachment is continuing to grow. Now up 118, making that about half of the Democrats in the House.
New York Times says that Castro and Yang need 1 more poll. They say that Tusli Gabbard has 128,000 donors but only 1 poll so far, impeachment activist Tom Steyer has 2 polls, and former Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado has 1 poll. A spokesman for Mr. Steyer said he was “on track to collect the required number of donors to make the September debate stage†but did not give a number. Mr. Hickenlooper’s campaign did not respond, but Politico reported a month ago that he had only 13,000 donors. The other 11 candidates in the race have no qualifying polls to their name. Aug. 28 is the deadline. Candidates like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York or Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington could be washed out of the race if they don’t get momentum from this week’s debates.
Just heard news on Lawrence’s show that Russian bots are promoting Tulsi Gabbard online and making racial attacks against Kamala Harris.
Not surprised. Mueller warned that they are still actively attacking us.