Now we are down to six, just six, candidates left on the Democratic presidential debate stage, reaching the point at which the discussions were to become momentous, trenchant, riveting. So why, after last night’s snoozefest, is my main thought that if I ever hear the phrase “day one” again, I am going to shoot myself or someone else?
Oh, there were moments. Quickdraw Liz had a dandy one, the headliner of the night, when she pointed out that the men on the stage had collectively lost a total of ten elections, while the women had prevailed in every single one of theirs, a total of something like four. This got a nice round of laughter and light applause that rolled right over Uncle Bernie’s protest that no one, and certainly not him, was even saying that a woman couldn’t win the presidency. Lizzie’s zinger was, of course, the oldest and dreariest of political maneuvers, the aggressive truism, the resoundingly answered non-question, the straw man lovingly resurrected and then lynched. A trope competently executed on the whole, absolutely deserving of that light applause. But does anyone believe it shows the Stuff needed to slay the bellowing giant who daily strides up and down the ranks on the other side, daring us to come out and fight?
Elsewhere on the stage, no one “broke out.” Certainly not Mayor Pete nor No-Frills Amy, the centrist darling for whom the polls and I have been eagerly waiting. Both were pretty much content to stand there genially smiling (or in Klobuchar’s case, squinting) as they paraphrased earlier performances. Uncle Bernie went on looking and sounding lovable while saying things about “the greed of the billionaire class” and “the greed and corruption of corporations” that are, if you think for a second, pretty scary. Where are all the billionaires going to be sent for reeducation, exactly, and if I once owned some IBM stock do I have to go with them? Worrisomely, money-hating Bernie has enough of the stuff to prolong the nomination fight far into the summer and make 2020 a replay of 2016, should he and his better angels elect to do that.
Just when you thought it couldn’t happen again, everyone went down the rabbit hole of their separate health care plans, scrutinizing minutiae, counting cards, straining gnats out of the soup. Luckily there were no tomatoes handy for the audience, no crates of rotten cabbage. Just the night before, Lawrence O’Donnell had observed that from now on all anyone needed to say about health care was, “I will sign the bill we come up with,” which would inevitably be far better than anything on offer from the Toad King and his zombie armies. Our stalwart six apparently missed the memo.
In the post-debate that is so often “better TV” than the debate itself, commentators theorized that the odd protocols of the Iowa caucuses, vaguely similar to the system of ranked-choice voting that a rational republic would have adopted at the Founding (perhaps in lieu of the Rube Goldberg machinery of the Electoral College), incentivized second place and made the contestants unduly cautious. Whether it was that or something in the Iowa water, everyone agreed it was an uninspiring, low-energy night. People went through the motions, leaving their minds elsewhere. Joe Biden, ever the train wreck you can’t stop watching, epitomized the evening by doing what old men (I speak as one) do: disappearing into himself for long stretches, with an unbelievably sour expression on his still-handsome face. He seemed to keep rediscovering the audience with slight startlement: “Oh — you’re still here?”
Conceivably Biden was sulking over a Joe Hendrickson article in the current Atlantic that outs him as a youthful — and a continuing — stutterer. Hendrickson, a stutterer himself, argues that the disorder, albeit much attenuated, continues to afflict Biden mightily, but that denial is essential to the former VP’s coping strategy. To keep on his game, he has to treat the problem as something transcended long ago, weaving a tale of hardship overcome.
Biden’s debate performance could hardly have been better evidence for the article. He never stuttered, exactly; but he did everything but. Scowled. Grimaced. Wrestled the corners of his mouth down onto his chin and back up. Spoke too fast and then too slow. Blew out sharp gusts of air mid-word. Clenched his jaw, staring at his own shirt buttons in helpless fury. Leapt dizzyingly from one sentence plan to another, or all the way from one topic to a completely different one, just because he was not going to be able to get that next word out over the dam of his writhing lips.
Hendrickson thinks a frank admission of the problem would be therapeutic for Biden. Might it also be a good political move, winning votes by way of empathy (not pity, exactly)? That was Jennifer Grantholm’s line at one of the after parties. But this jittery electorate — confused, fearful, angry, disinformed, often hateful — chose a strong-man last time, or a Chaplinesque semblance of one, and seems unlikely to turn around now and go all gooey on us. What it wants from Old Joe, if it wants anything, is steadiness and strength. A big heart and splendidly electable teeth may not be enough.
But there down at the end, in the corner to which you consigned him back at the very first debate, the corner for billionaire hobbyists, was Tom Steyer, looking lean, tall, spiffy, handsome, shockingly youthful, and, unlike any of the others, happy to be there. He said at least two things that mattered: 1) “I’m a businessman. A real one who started from scratch and made it, not a fake businessman like Trump. He will run on the economy because it’s all he has. But I can beat him on the economy.”
Real food for thought, there. This Potemkin prosperity, floating on fracked gas and uncountable debt, needs to be exposed for what it is. Steyer may have the chops for the job, as Warren might. And then #2:
“I still can’t believe it. I’m the only one up here who will declare a climate emergency on day one.”
That last phrase, I may have hinted, is ready for composting. And in one way Steyer sounds a bit silly: a climate emergency is not a thing, not in the way an impeachment or a declaration of war is. But Steyer at least seemed to name the Banquo’s ghost that was haunting the festivities, mysteriously sucking the life out of everyone. Prolonged and determined flights from truth are apt to leave a residue of depression. And no one at these debates has been saying a serious word about global warming.
Really, no one. Global warming denialism, it’s growing clear, comes in two distinct flavors. First there is basic conservative: just refuse to admit the facts. Shut your eyes, plug your ears. Shout down the evidence or spend days dreaming up bullshit arguments against it. Trust God and Exxon, and let the latter run a multibillion-dollar, madly lucid, Luciferian campaign to suppress what it knows, viz., that global warming has gotten a three-century head start on us, and that efforts to ameliorate or reverse it or adapt to it are too puny now almost by definition, with all that CO2 still up there doing what it does.
And then there is the optimistic, liberal, let’s-do-it variety, which can be almost as bad. All democratic candidates so far practice it without exception or deviation. In this version, you affirm the facts, even dramatize them. You cite a quantity of nerdy data and then, while everyone is off-balance, issue rousing calls for action, as if it were really possible to act against a catastrophe so pitiless and comprehensive. You don’t quite mention what the data really show, that the earth is now marching toward uninhabitability (at least by us) with the inexorability and nearly the haste of an asteroid strike, though the progress can seem slow to a merely human eye. You don’t explain that we are now just reaching the place where all the trend lines bend toward infinity, so that, absent a nuclear exchange, a global depression, a worldwide plague, or some such stroke of luck, global warming will continue, will just keep going and even accelerating. You don’t point out the iron law that connects global emissions to population, or complain that for all our talk, emissions are still increasing every year, when what our survival requires is that they drop to zero and keep going. Or that the price of accomplishing anything like that would (not will) be thinning the human herd by unthinkable percentages, then leading a life of unimaginable privation.
If you are a candidate for office but otherwise sane, you skim right over all this. But you talk at length about neighborhood recycling programs, about urban reforestation and vegan Tuesdays. You try to do the doable and play for time and then, just like your conservative cousins, pray for a miracle.
But deep down (this is where the depression comes from) you at least suspect your true situation. You are on the deck of the Titanic. The iceberg struck several hours ago. The lifeboats have all cast off. The gigantic bow is starting to wallow, the stern to lift just enough so you can begin to see it against the backdrop of stars. The ocean is thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit.
Well, you always were mortal. Now what? Do you stay right here and listen to the orchestra play two or three more songs? Or go below and prowl around, see if there is still a bottle of wine or a dry sandwich somewhere? Or do you grab a cup and start bailing, just because? The choice is entirely yours.
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