Opinion | Fight Night, er, Debate Night: Biden vs. the World


Opinion | Fight Night, er, Debate Night: Biden vs. the World

Well, you can’t say the Democratic debates were entirely dreary.

On Wednesday everybody looked forward to the meeting of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who had tortured him so effectively in Debate 1.

And instantly — controversy! “Go easy on me, kid,” Biden told Harris when they shook hands. Either it was return of nice-guy Joe, or it was yet another moment of Not Getting It by a former vice president who doesn’t know you don’t call a female member of the U.S. Senate “kid.”

You pick.

The two of them then instantly laced into one another over health care. “This idea is a bunch of malarkey,” Biden said of Harris’s Medicare-for-all plan. Harris basically said that the old Obama administration system was “immoral” and “untenable.”

And everybody picked up the theme. The whole point, it seemed, was to see who could beat up on Biden most effectively. The theme of both of this week’s debates was moderates versus progressives, but on Day 2 Biden was pretty much Mr. Moderate. Other candidates espoused middle-of-the-road positions, but they were pretty much yelling in the shadows.

“What we need are politicians that actually have some guts on this issue,” Julián Castro said in an immigration argument, looking at the former vice president.

“I have guts enough to say his plan doesn’t make sense,” Biden retorted.

It was certainly way more lively than the first night of Democrats, where the crowded stage made everything a lot harder to stay alert. Viewers on CNN really deserved a medal reading, “I stayed awake until Jake Tapper said good night.”

The moral of both nights, really, was that there had to be a one-on-one fight. Warren versus Sanders. Nine people versus Biden.

But behind it all was the looming specter of You Know Who. While Biden was demonstrating he could be less polite, Donald Trump was having a rather typical week of doing his best to ruin the country.

The nation learned that his pick for director of national intelligence was an extremely conservative congressman whose greatest claim to expertise was six months on the House Intelligence Committee. And of yelling at Robert Mueller on behalf of Trump, to whom he has — surprise! — shown deep dedication.

The president also signed a bill funding care of 9/11 responders and took the opportunity to mention his own alleged role post-terror attack.

“And I was down there also, and I’m not considering myself a first responder,” he said modestly. “But I was down there. I spent a lot of time down there with you.”

The man was looking out a window from his luxury quarters uptown. And bragging on radio that with the World Trade Center gone, his building on Wall Street was the tallest building downtown.

And even that wasn’t true!

O.K., enough. We’re thinking about the Democratic debates.

The winner of the first night was Elizabeth Warren. (“We’re not going to solve the urgent problems that we face with small ideas and spinelessness.”) As a result, some Sanders and Biden backers are talking of recruiting her as their vice-presidential nominee. This is a problem both for those who believe Warren deserves to be first and those who believe a national ticket should ideally include at least one person under the age of 70.

Bernie Sanders was the other top first-night performer. And definitely the loudest. Is that a good thing? If voters are looking for change, will they be excited about a guy who’s really into shouting? It made an impact — Representative Tim Ryan came out of the Tuesday round remembered mainly for telling Sanders, “You don’t have to yell.”

The one problem with Sanders, throughout his presidential-running career, is that he basically has one speech. It’s about income inequality, which is certainly important. But it’s pretty much the same one he gave four years ago. There ought to be a little more variety.

For instance, at one point in the Tuesday debate, Sanders was asked about his call for free public college tuition and forgiving all student loan debt. You, of course, would want to hear why he’s including wealthy kids in the plan.

“Before I get into that,” he responded, “the major issue that we don’t talk about in Congress, you don’t talk about in the media, is the massive level of income and wealth inequality in America.” Then he went into his usual riff about Amazon not paying any federal income tax and the top 1 percent owning more wealth than the bottom 92 percent. All excellent points, but he didn’t really get around to the question of why the children of the top 1 percent ought to get free tuition.

And which of the obscure candidates did you like the best? John Delaney, yipping away and twisting his head like a little ferret looking for predators? That governor of Montana? Or was it Colorado? Or Washington? All of them? Wow.

We’ve still got 10 more debates to go. The next round is scheduled for September, in a week that begins with Grandparents Day and ends with a full moon. Perhaps Warren, Biden and Sanders will show the audience pictures of their grandchildren while Pete Buttigieg will suggest that he is young enough to be one of them. Then Biden can point out that would happen only if his parents and grandparents were married in their teens.

Then comes the full moon. Who do you think will be the surviving contender most likely to howl?

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