Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders took to the debate stage again yesterday in a largely substance-filled debate focused on income inequality, institutional racism and foreign policy. We begin with David A. Fahrenthold’s take at The Washington Post:
This truly was a PBS debate: genteel, civilized, lacking drama — and full of material that’s already aired somewhere else.
Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton spent most of Thursday night’s debate in what Clinton called “vigorous agreement” — disagreeing only about the methods they’d use to accomplish their common goals.
David Graham at The Atlantic:
Clinton’s mantra is execution. She repeatedly argued that Sanders owed voters a fuller explanation of how he’d get things done. She landed a direct blow on Sanders’s plan for free college tuition, which relies on states to cover one-third of the cost of tuition. Pointing to Wisconsin’s conservative Republican Governor Scott Walker, she said the plan was unrealistic: If red states wouldn’t accept Medicaid expansion that was 100 percent paid for, why would any GOP governors help Sanders out? She closed strong, saying, “I am not a single-issue candidate, and I do not believe we live in a single-issue country.”
Neither politician had a dominant night, and each had his or her stumbles. It was Sanders’s strongest performance so far on foreign policy, typically his Achilles’ heel, and his well-rehearsed message on the rigged economy resonates with Democrats. Clinton was even better, though. After Sanders debated well last Thursday and then trounced her in New Hampshire, Clinton badly needed a strong performance tonight, and she got it. Clinton was competent, wonky, and pounced on Sanders’s weaknesses. But is this debate enough to stall Sanders’s momentum and help her to regain her footing, or is it just a brief respite for her?
Jonathan Martin at The New York Times gave the edge to Clinton in the debate:
Facing off against Senator Bernie Sanders on Thursday night, Hillary Clinton did not comport herself like someone who had just suffered a landslide loss in New Hampshire. She did not raise her voice or express anger. She did not demonize Mr. Sanders or suggest he would be a dangerous choice for Democrats. She remained calm as he pungently sought to highlight their differences.
Instead, she behaved like someone heading into Nevada and South Carolina with every reason to be confident and little to fear but her own missteps.
While Josh Voorhees at Slate sees a tie, which he sees as a positive for Sanders:
There was no clear winner on the PBS stage. There were no major gaffes, or clear-cut knockout blows. Both Sanders and Hillary Clinton had their moments, and their (minor) mistakes. But most of their exchanges centered on posture—Bernie the idealist; Hillary the pragmatist—not policy. Sanders seized every opportunity he could to deliver his secular sermon on income inequality. Clinton never missed a chance to tout her experience and policy knowledge.
Althea Legaspi at Rolling Stone features a new Sanders ad featuring Eric Garner’s daughter:
The four-minute ad opens with Garner detailing the importance of her family and it also features her daughter. "This is what mommy is, I'm an activist," Garner says she explained to her daughter in the clip. "The same thing Martin Luther King was. He fought for our rights, this is the same thing I'm doing in honor of her pop-pop."
Later she reflects on her father's death. "No one gets to see their parent's last moments, and I was able to see my dad die on national TV," she says. "They don't know what they took from us." [...]
In a post on Erica Garner's website, she stated she and her team had full creative control of the video. "The senator didn't reach out to me all of a sudden because he needs help with Black people," she wrote. "He didn't put out a press conference announcing that we would be working together. He didn't force me to frame my support of him around a subject matter that special interest groups that support him can get behind.”
Lawrence Korb, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, has a piece at Politico defending Sanders on what many believe to be his weakest area — foreign policy:
...Sanders certainly isn’t a foreign policy lightweight: In fact, given his long tenure in the House and Senate, he has more foreign policy experience than Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama did when they were running for office the first time.
What would a President Sanders’ foreign policy look like? Based on his record and my conversation with him, I believe it would be rooted in a number of key principles. First is restraint in using American force abroad. As he has stated, and as is demonstrated by his vote against the Iraq War and the first Gulf War, Sanders believes military action should be the last, not first, option and that, when taken, such action should be multilateral. I also believe, based on our conversation, that he would follow the Weinberger Doctrine (also known as the Powell Doctrine): When the United States uses military force abroad, our objectives should be clear, we should be prepared to use all the force necessary to achieve those objectives, and we should know when they have been achieved. [...]
I have no doubt that Sanders will be willing to challenge the foreign policy establishment, as Obama did on such issues. Does Sanders have the same amount of foreign policy experience as Hillary Clinton? Obviously not. But Bill Clinton had far less foreign policy experience than George H.W. Bush, and Obama had less than John McCain—and both presidents had effective foreign policies. If he is elected, I believe Sanders will also be able to attract a competent foreign policy cohort, just as Obama did—including many of the current Clinton team. With the right partners in place—and, above all, the right principals and instincts—a President Sanders could be just the foreign policy president we need.
Meanwhile, Eugene Robinson at The Washington Post examines candidate flaws on both sides of the aisle, though of course the Republican side has a lot more to be concerned about:
After Iowa and New Hampshire, the undisputed leader of the pack is Donald Trump. With him as the party’s standard-bearer, what could possibly go wrong? I hear the GOP establishment sobbing.
Suffice it to note that there is a large segment of the voting population that would never vote for Trump under any circumstances, according to polls. And at any moment there would be the possibility that he could say or do something so outrageous that it would send the GOP to historic defeat.
But running second among Republican candidates is Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), whose doctrinaire far-right views could also drag down the party’s entire ticket. And Cruz has an additional problem: He comes across as unlikable, perhaps because of his tendency to sound like a pitchman on a late-night television commercial. He is so unpopular among his Senate colleagues that they would have to swallow hard to give him energetic backing in the general election.
Turning to the Republican side again, Nicholas Kristof at The New York Times reminds Republicans that they created Donald Trump:
Over the decades they pried open a Pandora’s box, a toxic politics of fear and resentment, sometimes brewed with a tinge of racial animus, and they could never satisfy the unrealistic expectations that they nurtured among supporters.
Perhaps it started in 1968 with Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” recruiting white segregationists infuriated by the civil rights movement. It then expanded to encompass immigration and the three G’s — God, guns and gays.
Political nastiness and conspiracy theories were amplified by right-wing talk radio, television and websites. Democrats often felt disadvantaged by the rise of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, but in retrospect Limbaugh and Fox created a conservative echo chamber that hurt the Republican Party by tugging it to the right and sometimes breeding a myopic extremism in which reality is irrelevant. A poll released in September found that Republicans were more likely to think that Obama was born abroad than Ted Cruz was. That poll found that Trump supporters believed by nearly 3-to-1 that Obama was born overseas.
And David Knox at Salon challenged John Kasich on his jobs claims:
In the nearly five years Kasich has been governor, Ohio saw total nonagricultural employment grow only 7.6 percent, compared to the national average of 9.4 percent, ranking it 24th among the 50 states. States growing jobs faster include the four most populous — California, Texas, Florida and New York — as well as states in the New South, Pacific Northwest and three of Ohio’s neighbors: Michigan, Indiana and Kentucky. [...] Whichever criteria is used — all nonfarm jobs or private-sector only — Ohio is far from Kasich’s boast of being “one of the fastest growing states in the country.”
And, on a final note, Timothy Egan imagines Day One of a Trump presidency:
The front-runner, Trump, is a big Day One man. His election itself will usher in “so much winning,” as he said, “that you will get bored with it.” But there will also be so much torturing. Trump has vowed to inflict cruelties on our enemies that are “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” Endless possibilities there, though he’d have to contend with the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which was ratified by the United States.
Dignity, class, humility and the truth would all be immediate Day One casualties of a Trump presidency. He lies without flinching, and makes up his own facts with the dexterity of a sociopath, dating to his insinuation that President Obama was not born in this country. He would govern the same way. It’s well known that Trump does not recognize climate change. But less publicized are his truther statements about basic economic facts.