I started watching the debate with good intentions — I didn’t take copious notes but I tweeted a few comments along the way so I’ll reconstruct my impressions by checking twitter. These are purely my impressions; I haven’t done any reading yet on what others have to say, and, to be honest, I was folding laundry, and checking in on the kids, and tucking one in along the way, so I missed a lot.
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Odd “pre-debate” starting point: a taped message from Obama, in the nature of a campaign commercial boasting of his time as president and urging election of a Democrat. Justified because it was shown to the audience at the debate. In fact, the whole debate itself was different than prior ones; instead of the standard injunction to be quiet, the audience was encouraged to cheer for their favorites.
The debate started with an opening more reminiscent of the start of a sports playoff, then with the national anthem. Odd — I certainly didn’t remember this from the GOP version. Is this meant to signal patriotism?
The opening statements: fairly unforgettable but so carefully memorized that, except for Sanders, they seemed to be reading from a directly-in-front-of-them teleprompter.
The moderator starts off with the premise of asking each candidate about their weakness but I don’t remember Clinton’s question, just Sanders’: “aren’t you a crackpot socialist?” To which he replied that his models are the Scandinavian countries, and he wants the U.S. to be like them. (Remind me to blog later on the fact that the progressive image of Sweden is far from the reality — heck, they and Norway both reformed their Social Security systems.)
Clinton is asked about her staking a claim, in various venues to being both a “progressive” and a “moderate” — her answer is basically “I am a progressive moderate,” trying to square the circle. It was clear that “moderate” was a dirty word that couldn’t be admitted to.
O’Malley was asked about his record in Baltimore, to which is replied, basically, “you think it’s bad now? It was a ton worse before I was there!”
Webb had apparently made a statement expressing skepticism about affirmative action, to which he said, “I support affirmative action for the black community because of the legacy of discrimination; but I doubtful that it makes sense for other groups” — though he didn’t specify who he meant. Presumably he had in mind recent immigrants, or perhaps also women as well.
On guns: the first thing to note is that the stylebook seems to dictate the phrase “common sense gun safety legislation” — over and over again. No specifics on what this means, though, except that Sanders was called on to defend his vote against a bill which would have made gun dealers liable for crimes committed with guns they sell. His response is partly-reasonable: “you have to understand the bigger picture that this bill, like so many others, contained a mix of reasonable and unreasonable provisions” — but at the same time, he then moved to “you have to understand that I come from Vermont and my constituents would have my hide if I voted for a bill like this.” He came off, to me at least, as saying “my constituents are unreasonable and they made me do it,” and he repeated this several times, not revisiting the first bit about the objectionable bits in this particular bill, which Clinton and others either did vote for or affirmed they would have.
Webb, on the other hand, wasn’t backing down from his support for gun ownership for self-defense. Good luck with that!
On foreign policy, and Clinton’s infamous “reset”: her rationale is that Medvedev was a reasonable, moderate fellow who could be worked with. The only problem was the subsequently Putin regained control and started to cause trouble. Really? She’s trying to spin this as if Medvedev wasn’t working together with Putin the whole time?
The general chorus on Syria was a unanimous: “not our problem.”
Sanders was asked, “when would you use force” and he used the example of fighting ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Now, to be sure, this was some low-hanging fruit, a pretty low-risk intervention, but if your standard is fighting ethnic cleansing, then shouldn’t the genocide of religious minorities in ISIS-controlled territory merit some concern — or at least some honesty, if what you really mean is “I support use of force to stop injustice when it looks pretty risk-free”?
Then I went o get some more laundry to sort and all the sudden they were back to Iraq and squabbling over who opposed military action there most strongly, and reiterating the (since-disproven) claim that “Bush lied!”
The closest to a zinger of the night: Clinton was apparently prattling on about no-fly zones, and O’Malley said something to the effect of “hey, you have to enforce a no-fly zone, Senator Clinton, not just declare one.” If memory serves, Clinton’s reply was that we would pawn off the work onto our allies.
Here’s Clinton’s defense of what happened in Libya: 1) Qadaffi was threatening to do bad things to people, 2) our allies really wanted us to intervene, and 3) hey! they held free elections before things went to pot. Of course, 1) the same was true of Saddam, 2) we don’t (or shouldn’t) be making decisions based on allies in this fashion and 3) Iraq also had free elections — remember the purple-finger celebrations?
Then the candidates were asked about the greatest national security threat: Clinton said something about keeping nukes away from terrorists. Sanders says climate change. Really?
Somewhere along the way there seems to have been discussion about what appear to be the Health Care Reform agenda items for 2016: free college, and paid parental leave. (Not free child care?) No real disputes among the candidates except for who’d be most successful, with one or another of the candidates reminding the others, and the audience, that you have to work with a likely-GOP congress to get any such thing passed. It seems to me that Clinton touted her ability to do so, while at the same time, being proud that they hated her guts.
The high point of the debate: some discussion about the e-mail issue, and I came back to the TV just in time to hear Bernie Sanders defending Clinton: “no one cares about the e-mails.”
In the end, it’s game over — does Sanders really want to be president? No. It’s been long speculated that his objective, and the objective of his supporters, is to push Clinton to the left. But here it is: Democrats don’t care about the e-mail issue; perhaps in other circumstances, they would, but they don’t see themselves as having a good alternative to Clinton and winning the White House is key, so they’re willing to discard questions of whether she put national security at risk, or used her office for personal advantage, or is failing to disclose correspondence. And Sanders’ response here makes it clear: he doesn’t want Clinton to be damaged, because he knows she’s the nominee. Fundamentally, he’s protecting her. If we had a multiparty coalition-building system, he’s be the minor party trying to get enough votes to put him in a position to start making demands in a coalition agreement.
And that was about as much as I could stand, and I started watching the Big Bang Theory (on On Demand), until my husband came back from his meeting and the show ended, and we resumed watching. “Who’s your greatest enemy?” or something like that was answered variously as “the GOP” by Clinton, and “the guy on the battlefield who lobbed a grenade at me, but he didn’t survive!” by Webb. Then closing statements with nothing memorable and it was finally over.
Now, I know I’m not the target audience. I liked Webb, but for reasons that make him completely unelectable as a Democrat. Fundamentally, it seems like what’s going on is a bidding war, of who can promised to turn us in to the most caricatured version of (pre-reform) Sweden, which speaks to their audience.
And, to reiterate, there are just my impressions. I haven’t read further commentary, from the left or right. For those who also watched it, what did you think?
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