4th Debate Reaction

Bernie Sanders took on the role of front runner tonight, fielding attacks from Hillary Clinton all night. It is the role that she is most comfortable in. Clinton destroyed Sanders on gun control and finally found an argument to counter Sanders on single payer healthcare: the embrace of the most popular Democrat alive, President Obama, and his signature policy achievement, Obamacare. Clinton spent the entire night trying to convince Democrats she was the heir to President Obama’s legacy. She made clear she is running for Obama’s third term. It’s a smart strategy because it serves the double-purpose of implying that Sanders is less friendly to Obama. Clinton was effective, presidential and the clear winner of the debate.

Sanders had his moments, especially railing against Wall Street and he did ding Hillary on speaking fees she had received from Goldman Sachs. But in order to help himself in the primary, he needs to take his trademark anger and shouting and direct it towards Republicans rather than Hillary. Aside from some Progressives who hate Hillary more than they hate Republicans (and thus already support Sanders), Democrats are not angry with Hillary. They like her a lot, actually. No, they, we, are angry with Republicans, for a whole host of reasons. To win the primary, Bernie needs to win the votes of Democrats who like Hillary. So he cannot really attack her and should not direct his anger towards her. Which is why he was smart to back away from his comments on Bill Clinton. No, what Bernie needs to do is convince Democrats that he is the one to take on Republicans.

Suzy Khimm:

One of Hillary Clinton’s fundamental problems has been her lack of a unifying, captivating message to rally voters, which has let Bernie Sanders drum up the enthusiasm in the race. That’s one reason why her attacks on Sanders’s single-payer plan fell short last week: She attacked him from the right on the plan’s cost without grappling with the idea itself—or explaining her own vision for the future. Last fall, Clinton often repeated the line, “I’m not running for Obama’s third term, I’m running for my first term,” but during Sunday’s Democratic debate, she bear-hugged Obama. Having watched her recent attacks backfire badly, Clinton’s new strategy to rally the Democratic base back is to cast Sanders as an opponent of Obama and the president’s legacy.

In an decidedly anti-establishment political environment, it has been a struggle for Clinton to define herself and her image. But in embracing Obama, she has found a message that is both a vigorous defense of the status quo and celebration of Obama’s legacy as a reformer.

What Progressives unlike myself do not understand, is that we Democrats love Obama. To win a Democratic Primary, you better bear hug Obama. He is like Reagan is to the GOP now.

Dylan Matthews at Vox thinks Bernie Sanders won the debate, and thus, Clinton lost by not winning.

Bernie is now posting his best poll numbers of the campaign to date, as he excitedly pointed out in a moment that echoed Donald Trump’s matter-of-fact citation of polling at Thursday’s Republican debate. He’s only four points behind in Iowa and gaining, solidly ahead in New Hampshire, and has momentum nationally too. There’s a very real possibility that he wins the first two primary contests and leaves Clinton scrambling to recover in South Carolina.

What he needed to do Sunday night was maintain that momentum, continue his appeal to liberal base voters, and blunt any attacks that Clinton might be tempted to unleash at him. He accomplished all of that, even if he didn’t give a focused, dominant performance. His release of his single-payer financing details denied Clinton a major attack line, he avoided getting bogged down in guns (clearly his worst issue from the Democratic base’s perspective), and struck an ecumenical tone that made him seem relatively above the fray as Clinton tried out various critiques targeting him.[…]

At the risk of sounding tautological, Clinton lost by not winning. The trends aren’t in her favor at the moment. Sanders is gaining in Iowa and is starting to be treated like a serious candidate by the press. Her attempts to attack Sanders’s support for single-payer health care this week were widely perceived as backfiring, especially among liberal primary voters who might be tempted to support Clinton out of practicality. She needed to a debate in which she could show that Sanders was out of his depth, not someone you could plausibly see actually functioning as president. She didn’t do that this time around.

Brian Beutler:

Sanders, in other words, finally debated like a candidate who thinks he stands a good chance of winning. To the extent that the Democratic National Committee and most high-ranking elected Democrats want Clinton to be the party’s nominee, the good news is that Clinton, as she generally does in debates, performed impressively, too.

But over the past week, she and her campaign engaged in an odd, tendentious, and tin-eared series of political attacks on Sanders over his support for single-payer health care—an idea that’s extremely popular among Democratic primary voters. Rather than limit her criticism of Sanders’s position to questions of political feasibility, the Clinton campaign articulated the strange view that the country should forego a fight over single-payer health care because single-payer health care is bad in the abstract.

On Sunday she corrected the error, in large part by tapping into something obvious but important: Many Democrats like President Obama, they’re proud of Obamacare, and they aren’t comfortable with the idea that it needs to be fundamentally overhauled rather than built upon. Rather than dismiss single-payer disingenuously as a regressive alternative to Obamacare, Clinton expressed the perfectly defensible view that corralling Democrats into a new fight, premised on the idea that Obamacare isn’t worth improving, is ceding ground unnecessarily in order to shoot for the political moon.

Generally speaking, Clinton avoided below-the-belt attacks on Sanders, though she played footsie with one when she defended the toughness of her plan to further regulate Wall Street by intimating that Sanders is a pawn of the financial industry).

For liberals who are excited by the prospect of forging a more progressive but well-moored party consensus, the debate was an unalloyed victory. But for Democrats who would sacrifice a protracted debate to begin the work of reuniting the party early, Sunday night was a decidedly more mixed affair. They saw that Bernie Sanders really is a formidable opponent who will be hard to fend off in Iowa and New Hampshire. They also saw that Hillary Clinton is a candidate who could pull it off.

Emphasis mine. Progressives should be happy about that. The vision for the party is now unquestionably ours. Sanders has accomplished what should be his mission: making Hillary more progressive and making the Party more progressive.

Josh Marshall:

[E]ven when they’re fighting, I find myself liking Clinton and Sanders even more than I already do. […] One of my big questions going into tonight was whether Clinton would really bring her recent kind of hard-charging, aggressive, almost cartoonish attacks on Sanders into the debate hall. Mostly she didn’t. She hit hard at a few points at the beginning. But her critiques, especially on health care were more subtle and refined and sounded less desperate than recent headlines generated by her campaign.

On the other side of the equation, I think she’s somewhat defused by Sanders himself. He simply doesn’t have that kind of brass knuckle politics in him. Even when he gets his hackles up a bit, every response from him is inherently defusing. There’s less charge in the air, less animus after he speaks than before. And I mean all this in both the good and bad senses in which you might understand what I’m saying. At a very basic level, just temperamentally, he doesn’t seem to have time for this stuff.

[…] I thought Hillary Clinton did very well in this debate. She was quick on her feet, deeply knowledgable. She shows herself as unflappable. Several times I heard her answering questions in ways that were subtle, knowledgable and showed a tendency not to go for the political answer but to highlight complexities in highly politicized questions which are often ignored. I was impressed.

But Sanders did well too. His words and his very manner communicate a fundamental decency and impatience with bullshit which is deeply appealing. If you believe the country needs deep and even radical reform, particularly on economic policy, he is your guy. One of the things that makes him such a good messenger for this message is that while his message is radical and he speaks about “revolutionary” change there’s little in the man that seems impulsive, hasty or trigger happy. There’s a certain temperamental caution which balances that deep-seated belief that only thorough-going change can address the nation problems.