Debate II: Uncle Joe Takes a Hit

Be careful what you wish for. I have been wanting Biden to fade and Harris to surge, but I didn't like the way it happened. 

My reason for opposing Biden is simple and brutal: he's too damned old. He could win the nomination and drop dead three weeks later, and then where would we be? Life is just not fair sometimes. He couldn't buy life insurance at the same rates as Kirsten Gillibrand, either. 

And I like Harris a lot because she's a staunch progressive but with plenty of realism and toughness suggested by her background as a prosecutor and California AG. And because, other things being anywhere near equal, it should be the turn of a woman and a POC, this time. And possibly most of all, she is exactly the right age to take on the world's toughest job. Old enough to know lots about how the world works, young enough to pull an all-nighter when she needs to. And to represent younger folks who have been shadowed by us Boomers long enough. 

Still, by all the rules of debate this OWG knows, Biden was having a pretty good night right up to and through the point when, all the talking heads agree, she demolished him. All the press going in had been about his vulnerabilities, but he defended various parts of his long record vigorously and crisply, showing an impressive command of policy minutiae and plenty of spirit. 

Then came the attack for which Harris has gotten such rave reviews. Here's approximately what I saw: 1) Harris demands, and gets, uninterrupted speaking time "as the only African American on this stage"; 2) Proceeds to assure Biden that she doesn't think he's a racist, but 3) says his recent remarks about two segregationist senators have been "personally hurtful" to her; which 4) she proves by tearing up as she 5) charges him, accurately enough I gather, with having opposed forced busing in the 70s; and 6) adroitly, famously by now, reveals that she herself was the beneficiary of required busing policy as a little girl.

This got an "Oh wow" look even from Biden. But his defense I thought was not completely inept, given that she had engineered a no-win conversation by this point. He pointed to his record as a long-time proponent of civil rights, and said that his opposition had been only to federally mandated busing, not to the program that her local government had allowed. What I heard there was, "I was doing what seemed possible at the time." My bad, I think: it was enlightening, later, to hear Van Jones explain that the answer was essentially a "states' rights argument" of the kind that was a chief pillar of Jim Crow for over a century. Not that I agree completely.

But what bothered me was the way Harris lost her prosecutorial cool and couched a perfectly reasonable argument in nakedly personal and emotional terms that seemed to permit no reply. What had happened to the toughness and objectivity I have previously admired in her? Did she really want to be saying "You hurt me" instead of making a reasoned argument in favor of busing and against his foot-dragging centrism at the time? File under "improper appeals to emotion," p. 326 in the Comp handbook. Silly me, I thought she was the one who was flaming out, and felt bad for her.

So it came as a shock, and then as a bit of a relief, to follow up on CNN and find that all the chatbots were scoring the encounter Harris 100, Biden 0. Even Chris Christie, doing shots with Stephen Colbert over on the Tonight Show, saw things just this way. This always happens to me in presidential debates: what I see as bad moments or silly remarks emerge in the press as, instead, bits of game-changing political brilliance. 

Anyway the outcome is basically good, IMO: Harris clearly established as a front-runner of the under-sixty set, Biden who might blow it for us helped toward the exits. I would be very happy with Harris as the nominee, but worry that a performance like tonight's, in the general, would be received quite differently. Trump will of course try to caricature her as (forgive me) wunna those angry black hormonal females you can't never please, and I think she would be better advised to go back into glacial-lawyer mode, which she does to perfection. While I'm at it, I worry that tonight she may have locked herself into two policy positions that may prove real losers: 1) Open borders, effectively. (A huge vulnerability for the Dems, which so far no one is addressing.) 2) Abolishing private health insurance in favor of Medicare for all (incremental change building on Obamacare tends to sound much more reasonable, and I don't hear anyone explaining why it wouldn't work, and work better). 

I don't have near enough fingernails to last till November 2020.

Ready, Aim, Maybe Not

Night #1. I thought it was a good debate for the party in that so many different people had good moments, one way or another, and everyone in the auditorium was so clearly Herr Dump's moral and intellectual superior. Mission accomplished for Warren I think in that she managed to deliver her essential message (economic justice) early on, then sort of let the game come to her for the rest of the night, though I'd add that too often she is in "Damn this is wrong" mode when she needs to be in "Here's how we fix it" mode. In fact she has practical ideas to back up all of her dreams and goals (free college, free day care), but this doesn't always come across. I would love a candidate who combined her passion with Klobuchar's calm, but this may be impossible by definition. Klob is my favorite, but I was disappointed to see her fading into the woodwork a bit. Her naturally self-effacing demeanor is one of the things I love, but this was not the format. . . . Except it might have been a good move for the long game -- biding her time till the emphasis of the campaign naturally shifts from "What are your dreams?" to "What is possible?" A lot of centrist voters might have liked what they saw from her, including not a little reticence. Her one surprising zinger at Inslee's expense was adroit and deadly and might prove an excellent investment, as the history of presidential debates shows that successful cheap shots (which it was, really) get replayed endlessly and remembered after everything else is forgotten.
I liked virtually everything Delaney and deBlasio said but would nonetheless eliminate both of them after tonight, based on a powerful and doubtlessly unfair gut impression that the one is a dingbat and the other an insufferable snob. The other two I would cull are Gabbard and Ryan, because Tulsi seems to completely misconstrue the security objectives that have kept us in Afghanistan so long, while Tim was unable to catch her at it and came out second best, in most people's reckoning, when the two mixed it up. (And really, some debate coach has to talk to Ryan about his "resting face," which is what one would bring to interview for a job as an undertaker.) What else? The talking heads all say that Julian Castro had a good night at Beto O'Rourke's expense, but I'm not so sure. I liked Castro but also Beto, not I hope just for his bedroom eyes, though they are a powerful asset. He projects empathy and good will very powerfully, and actually seems to know some things, possibly not including Spanish. Maybe it's just his format, as I think the first 30 seconds of his answers are better than anyone's. After that they taper off.
I'm keeping Inslee on my scorecard for now, out of a sentimental attachment of one nerdy doofus to another, and because he's the only one up there even hinting at the full, transcendent horror of climate change. 

A good night for the party. The Thuglicans will have a tough time caricaturing it as a bickering match or virtue-signaling Olympics, populated by a bunch of crazy spoiled limousine liberals, as is doubtless their intention.