I thought last night's debate was much better than the one we saw on July 31st. We got far more substance and clarity out of the candidates overall. This was a POLICY debate. That said though, do we really need to just stick to a nearly identical list of topics for discussion in each and every one of these debates? I ask because people in my community want to hear about what the candidates plan to do about opioids and other drugs more than anything else and topics like that just aren't arising in these debates very much at all.
The health care exchange at the beginning was tense, but really good! I mean to be honest, I think it was significant that neither Warren nor Sanders managed to directly answer Biden's question to them on how they each would finance the creation of a single-payer health care system, but I think enough clarity for ordinary working people was provided nonetheless. The fact is that the way Elizabeth Warren spoke about the matter, in terms of people paying less for access on balance under single-payer system, is in fact the way the ordinary working people want to hear about this issue. Real people don't talk about health care in the technical terms of payroll taxes versus premium costs, they think of it in terms of what will save them money in total. One got the sense that Biden was speaking to someone else in that moment.
I also thought that Bernie Sanders did particularly well when he highlighted the much higher cost to the nation of NOT embracing a streamlined system of medical insurance over the next decade: $50 trillion versus $30 trillion. THAT difference people can understand! I also loved that he highlighted the fact that health insurance industry would be advertising against his ideas during the debate. That DID happen! Although it's worth saying that the industry propaganda commercials I saw were explicitly opposed to ALL of the candidate's plans: any form of Medicare for all (single-payer or not) and any other public option. So it wasn't even just the ideas of Warren and Sanders that the industry was attacking here, in other words, it was those of ALL the Democratic candidates on the stage, including even Joe Biden! That is the industry's extremity: they are against the whole idea of having to even just compete with a nationally-owned insurer of any kind.
Andrew Yang started out extremely poorly by announcing a, um, sweepstakes of sorts, essentially bribing people to visit his campaign web site. (Now THAT smacked of pitiful desperation.) Eventually he recovered though when he got to talking about some of his more unique policy ideas such as providing each American with thousands of dollars designated specifically for campaign contributions (in addition to UBI) so that the voices of ordinary people can overwhelm those of high-dollar donors in theory. It's a clever idea and an interesting, libertarian sort of alternative to the publicly-funded election systems that are favored by the progressives as solutions to our current, rigged system of campaign finance. He also managed to do his thing and get back to talking on a human level there in that last hour or so in general, and that reminded me of what I'd liked about him.
Cory Booker I feel is sort of the Marco Rubio of this campaign: the news media declares him either the winner or at least a winner in each of these debates, and yet he never gets a noteworthy bounce in the polls as a result because he's not actually connecting to very many real people so much as to the general tone of dialogue on at America's elite liberal arts universities.
Beto O'Rourke was a genuinely sympathetic candidate this time around, owing to his switch to plain and passionate language, motivated clearly by the recent Trump-induced massacre by a white terrorist in his community of El Paso. I didn't actually agree with every idea he advanced, but I did like him better as a person last night than I had before. He came off as authentic for once, and that's what people have been wanting to see from him. No wonder he got so many compliments from even his rivals on the stage!
Kamala Harris fell flat. Much in contrast to her performance in the first debate, here she sounded very fake pretty consistently. And very, very dependent on nostalgic references to Obama and the specific invocation of Trump for her defense routinely. It seemed as though much of the time she was seeking a hostile Twitter response from the president to boost media attention in her direction.
The absence of Kirsten Gillibrand was felt by yours truly as well. *sniffles* That said, I nonetheless felt that one night of this was enough. It is time for the criteria to be where it is, at least in my view.
In the area of foreign policy, I...well I just disagree with large and important aspects of what the candidates are offering generally (including Elizabeth Warren's call to pull the last of our troops out of Afghanistan without a peace agreement in place between the Taliban and the official government). The standout here though was Joe Biden's suggestion that Afghanistan should be split up into, or at least treated as, three separate countries. That position closely resembled his proposal from the 2008 presidential campaign to actively break up Iraq into three separate countries, which was the reason I regarded him as the worst Democrat running in that primary contest, being as the Iraq War was the leading issue on the minds of voters for most of that campaign.
As a final thought, I actually REALLY liked that concluding query on resilience. I see it went over flat here, but I'm telling you this is how ordinary people want to hear the candidates. It's not ALL about policy; who you are as a person is definitely a factor in the minds of ordinary working people, and this really humanized many of the candidates by getting them to tell us more about their personal backgrounds and what motivated them. As someone who has lost my unfair share of friends and family and just honestly, if I can be so honest, lives with a great deal of pain, I completely understand what Joe Biden meant when he said that the way you navigate loss is by giving purpose to it. That's how you survive it. That's absolutely been true for me! I've learned to try and find purpose in everything. Maybe too many things. (Even video games.) I also strongly connected to Elizabeth Warren talking about surviving through pure determination to do so. That's a huge factor for me as well, though I'm a far, far less accomplished person obviously. Bernie Sanders talked about grit too, but honestly I felt that he did so in an overall less human way, talking mostly about his political victories and career in government, which obviously I can't relate to on a human level. Andrew Yang's response laying out his struggles to find a career path in the world of small business wasn't something I could directly relate to, but which was powerful enough for me to genuinely feel nonetheless. His emotion was palpable. And even a lot of the other candidates too (like even Amy Klobuchar, who I've kind of written off and dismissed as a corporate robot) just told very human and reflective stories about their backgrounds. I really liked that conclusion and thought it may even have actually been the highlight of the evening.
As to Julian Castro's criticism of what supposedly was Joe Biden's health care plan, the one that seems to have gone over well here on VGC, ...yeah, okay. That was the single worst, lowest moment of the evening, in my opinion. It's not simply that Castro sunk to a Trumpian level by playing on Biden's age, suggesting that he's senile, it's that he was also factually wrong. I watched the post-debate fact check that reran the footage of the moment Castro sought to reference and, in fact, Biden specifically said that his public option plan would include automatic enrollment. So how that moment struck me, in the view of this fact, was as a jackass trying to gaslight his rival because of his age. The audience didn't care for it and neither did I. That moment probably helped Biden, if anything.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 13 September 2019
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