I know, I know, calm down. Bernie and Biden weren’t on the stage. And if I had to judge from the people who were on the stage, I’d say that Warren and De Blasio each had very good nights, Castro, Inslee, Gabbard and Booker each had their moments, and I was most disappointed in the performance of Beto. Not only do I think Beto lost this debate, but I wouldn’t be astonished if he was among the first to drop out, not because his polling numbers are going to drop below 6th or so, but because he’s going to realize that there is no path to the presidency or VP position for him, but that he does still have a career in Texas politics that is salvageable if he bows out gracefully. BTW, in over a decade of listening to De Blasio, I have literally never heard his rhetoric be as strong or as populist-Progressive as it was last night.
But here was the subtext of this debate: it was a “Progressive-off” for every candidate other than Delaney and Klobuchar (and occasionally Ryan). All of these candidates can read the polls, and they must all know that probably nobody on the stage not named Elizabeth has any realistic path to the nomination. So a lot of them are angling for VP or for a Cabinet or Administration position. The “lane” they choose is an indication of whose eye they’re trying to catch (i.e., who the eventual nominee is going to be, and whether they’re a good suitor for that person). The fact that Booker clearly moved Left, the fact that De Blasio was a Leftwing lion, the fact that Castro flexed his most Leftwing muscles—this probably indicates that these likely also-rans are trying to appeal to a Progressive nominee. Biden isn’t going to pick anyone very far to his Left, so they aren’t auditioning for him. Warren or Sanders might be shopping for voices like these, though.
This also seems to indicate that the field thinks Biden is going to falter. It would make no sense for these candidates to stake out positions way to Biden’s left if they felt he had a great chance to win. They’re not going to outflank Sanders and Warren on the Left, and they’d be dooming their chances of being chosen by Biden also, while they’d also be causing the party to have (another) messy Left-Center reconciliation later on, for no necessary reason.
Bernie Sanders was laughed at in 2016, pretty much, for declaring climate change the “top adversarial threat to the US” (or however it was phrased), more so than any military enemy or terrorist organization. His opponent said that Single Payer would never happen. A “living wage” was seriously in conflict at the time with the idea of “maybe let’s try to raise it to $12 and then see how high we can go at some later point.” Free college was considered inconceivable, and forgiving all student debt was laughed at even harder when (don’t yell at me) Jill Stein proposed it in 2016. Last night, Warren not only agreed with Bernie’s M4A plan, she defended it staunchly. When several people mentioned a living wage, there was no pushback. Several candidates mentioned climate change as our greatest threat. The fact that Klobuchar’s plan of a “public option” in health care sounded Dick Gephardt or Paul Tsongas in terms of current Democratic relevance (at least to me) is a sign of how far the party has careened Leftward recently, with Sanders as its most influential pied piper. And it showed how out of step the Biden agenda looks, not just compared to the 2 obvious Progressive contenders, but even to a median doctrinaire Democratic candidate.
It’s possible that Bernie will end up actually having been the “loser” of last night’s debate, in the fact that maybe he’ll be seen as superfluous, now that lots of people have adopted some of his policies. He could end up as a victim of his own success. But his policies definitely carried the night, and the fact that he wasn’t even present while this was happening shows how dominant his shadow over the party has become.
Biden, meanwhile, is in a tough spot. He has some likable qualities, and surely his support has multiple elements to it. But his main draw is clearly that “he is considered the most electable.” The problem with a candidacy with this as its primary plank is that if at any point his perceived electability advantage starts to fade, it could tumble down much more quickly than another candidate, because it’s a vicious cycle (“he’s less electable now, so he’s less popular as a choice, which makes him less electable”). In other words, if Biden loses the lead he has now, it’s hard to see how he recovers, because the thing that is most responsible for the staying power of his lead is….the fact itself that he has a lead. If the media begin to determine that the base wants someone other than Biden (because of debates like last night’s), it could hasten the fall of Biden even if he doesn’t himself change trajectories at all. This is the reason that Biden could be considered one of the losers of the debate—the zeitgeist appears to be moving Left, and he may increasingly look like the “old guard.” He also could look like a feel-good Luddite rebel that has circled around to becoming cool again because he is a fish out of water, that’s also possible. But it didn’t seem to be a very good night for Biden’s prescriptions for the party. It seemed clear which way this subtextual tug of war between the two (largely accepted) frontrunners is going.
Best tweet of the night: Marianne Williamson saying “I guess I have to learn Spanish by tomorrow night.”