NATIONAL—Ipsos/Reuters–Clinton 55, Sanders 43
NATIONAL—Ipsos/Reuters–Trump 35, Cruz 23, Rubio 14, Carson 11, Bush 7, Kasich 2
For the first time since the Democrats began debating in the fall, through six debates, we have a clear winner and a clear loser. Until now, both candidates usually did well enough where pundits and supporters could say “both Hillary and Bernie won.” Not last night.
Hillary clearly dominated the debate and scored a knockout punch with her closing argument that, as you will read below from others smarter than me, finally established her argument against Sanders, and it is a good one. She dominated on substantive points and on speaking style: calm, cool, collected. Last night she most reminded me of the man she hopes to replace. It was her best debate performance this cycle, if not ever.
Bernie, on the other hand, had his worst. I wonder if he is ill, and he could be, since it is winter, it’s cold season, and he was coughing throughout the debate. He also seemed off, cranky and mean. Usually Bernie’s endearing schtick, of that angry uncle or grandpa, normally comes off well. You liked his rants. Last night, the schtick was not endearing, and you heard audible groans from the audience with his mean and condescending comment “You’re not in the White House yet.” It played exactly how Barack Obama’s “You’re likeable enough, Hillary” played. An unnecessary and mean poke that has kinda shattered his charm a little bit. Hopefully it was just an off night for him, and not a sign of things to come.
Substantively, the debate revealed two new weaknesses for Bernie Sanders. First, he has a Rubio problem. Constant repetition of your stump speech and one central theme became obvious rather quickly, and it did not play well. Second, when wasn’t imitating Rubio, he digressed into this guy who was regurgitating 70 years of liberal and leftist foreign policy grievances, like that old crazy hippy that always shows up to every town hall meeting to talk about Cambodia. Look, I get it, Kissinger is a bad guy and Hillary should have just said “All he did was commend my running of the State Department, that’s all I said at the last debate,” and Bernie should have just left it at “Well, I wouldn’t be listening to Henry Kissinger for any advice whatsoever,” and the point would have been made. Instead, Bernie turned what was a mistake by Clinton into a massive mistake by Bernie. His young fans probably had to quickly google names like Mossadegh and United Fruit to figure out what he was talking about.
No doubt, you all think I am a biased Hillary shill. So don’t just take it from me. Ed Kilgore on how Bernie dumped his momentum in last night’s debate:
[Last night,] Sanders instead insisted he was the more faithful follower of Obama. This was a classic example of playing on his opponent’s ground, and since he could not follow Clinton’s passionate bear hug of the 44th president, he wound up giving her the initiative. Certainly it was odd for a candidate supposedly focused on expanding his electoral reach to spend a significant amount time and passion during the debate harping on old-hippie preoccupations from the 1950s (the CIA coup to topple Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh) and 1960s-70s (Henry Kissinger’s crimes against Cambodia). […]
There was even a bigger symbolic moment when Bernie cited people from a long-lost generation (FDR and Churchill) as his great inspirations, while Clinton went with the more recent and politically pointed Nelson Mandela (as compared to Abraham Lincoln in an earlier debate). Anything Clinton can do to turn the perception of Sanders from the exciting and forward-thinking pied piper of youth into a cranky old socialist is worth its weight in media gold.
Hillary Clinton easily won the debate. She was confident, knew the issues and didn’t let Sanders rattle her. The New York Times reported she had media training this week and it showed. In contrast, Sanders seemed tired, rarely smiled and was best when he was angry. He’s still great at framing the key issues of the campaign. But his phrasing is so similar in every debate that he may soon be accused of having a Marco Rubio robot problem.
On the candidates, I thought the debate began very well for Clinton and quite shaky for Sanders. He got a very basic question about the size of government, one he would certainly get in a general election and one which I do not think he should shy away from. But he wouldn’t touch it. Clinton was as strong and specific as he was hesitating and resistant to addressing specifics. […]
[T]here’s a vague hint of Rubio-ism in Sanders. When pressed on specifics he comes back to this very general if powerful critique about a rigged economy, a corrupt campaign finance system that undergirds that rigged economy and so forth. He keeps coming back to those same talking points. Now, he’s no Rubio of course. Rubes really is a callow pretty boy who’s had a series of elegantly crafted paragraphs produced for him to fit a certain political moment. What Sanders is saying is what he’s been saying for decades. It is rooted in a lifetime of a very specific way about thinking about the political economy, economic policy and the nature of equality itself. In a way the country or rather a decent chunk of it has simply caught up with him. […]
I think one meta strategy that Hillary brought into this debate was hitting specifics precisely to push Sanders back on to his same recitation. I will say that I thought Hillary’s close was a key moment in the debate, perhaps in the campaign. It’s not that she crushed him or anything. But it was the first time I heard her pull together her essential message in a coherent, memorable way. Here’s the key passage …
We agree we’ve got to get unaccountable money out of politics. We agree that Wall Street should never be allowed to wreck main street again. But here’s the point I want to make tonight. I am not a single-issue candidate and I do not believe we live in a single-issue country. I think that a lot of what we have to overcome to break down the barriers that are holding people back, whether it’s poison in the water of the children of Flint or whether it’s the poor miners who are being left out and left behind in coal country, or whether it is any other American today who feels somehow put down and depressed by racism, by sexism, by discrimination against the lgbt community against the kind of efforts that need to be made to root out all of these barriers, that’s what I want to take on.
In a sense, it’s just another recitation of her laundry list of to-dos. But here it’s a coherent critique of Sanders. It’s memorable. Something you can frame a key part of a campaign around. One can buy it or not buy it. But I think Hillary has many potential supporters who’ve been listening to her and found her just sort of scattered and all over the place. I imagine that when Hillary and Bernie supporters argue over their candidates, you’ll have Hillary supporters come back to “She’s not a single issue candidate.” It sums it all up.
Yeah, I think when the book is written on this campaign, that closing argument moment for Hillary will be the turning point in this primary.
[I]n the debate’s closing moments, Hillary Clinton sharpened one of her most promising—yet fraught—appeals to the Democratic base. Clinton frequently portrays herself as President Obama’s natural heir. On Thursday night, for the first time, she effectively portrayed Bernie Sanders as one of President Obama’s most inconstant allies.
Clinton has been using Obama as a human shield for weeks, and (as expected) she touted his achievements and their relationship throughout the debate. But tonight she was able to deploy her fidelity to Obama in a way that isolated Sanders from the cherished and undisputed leader of the Democratic Party.
In a Thursday interview with MSNBC, Sanders attributed the public’s misgivings about Congress to a lapse of presidential leadership—an implicit but pointed critique of Obama’s performance in office. Clinton used Sanders’s comments as a jumping-off point not just to align herself with Obama, but to write Sanders out of Obama’s legacy. She cited Sanders’s decision to blurb a new book by liberal writer Bill Press called Buyer’s Remorse about progressive disenchantment with Obama, and reminded viewers that Sanders openly called for Obama to face a primary challenge from the left in 2012.
Obama certainly has greater enemies in politics than Sanders—but that was in many ways Clinton’s point. Sanders lays setbacks at Obama’s feet that should rightly be attributed to Republicans and the right’s massive resistance to his presidency. Sanders’s disenchantment with Obama thus isn’t a just a simple question of loyalty or partisanship, but a reminder of the political naivete that makes him imagine he’d face any less resistance.
Of course, Clinton was also creating as much daylight as possible between Sanders, who is popular among progressives, and Obama, who is the most popular progressive in America. It appeared to work.
The whole “Obama Failed Leadership” critique from Sanders does infuriate me, because it is a Republican critique. And you are not going to win over Obama supporters, which make up the VAST majority of Democrats, by trashing the President with Republican talking points. This was another reason Bernie lost last night. He forgot he was running for the Democratic nomination.
Dylan Matthews has his usual Winners and Losers segment (which is, by the way, far more substantive and readable, and less full of Beltway crap than Chris Cillizza’s, in case you were wondering), and this time was the first time that Bernie was not a winner in his post-Democratic Debate wrap ups. His winners were, in this order: Hillary Clinton, Black Lives Matter, and Barack Obama. His losers, in this order: Republicans, Wall Street and Henry Kissinger.
[C]linton made vigorous defense of the Obama legacy — and suggestions that Sanders is less than fully committed to it — the centerpiece of her argument. Early on she defined herself as an advocate of “President Obama’s principle accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act,” and slammed Sanders for jeopardizing it.
The essential strategy, seen several times during the debate — but most crucially during an exchange over Wall Street — was to use Obama as a human shield.
Did Sanders want to say that Obama was corrupt because he received campaign contributions from the financial sector? When Sanders says we need a political revolution, does that mean he thinks Obama was a failure?
Sanders largely refused to take the bait, declining to criticize Obama even when that forced him to blunt his criticisms of Clinton. That even the Left Opposition within the Democratic Party doesn’t want to voice clear criticisms of the president makes him a clear winner.
Andrew Prokop says Hillary has found her argument against Bernie Sanders:
Regardless of whether you agree with Clinton here, I suspect this was a significant moment and that we’ll hear a whole lot more of her and her surrogates attempting to portray Sanders as a “single-issue candidate.” Because this one narrative accomplishes several of Clinton’s political objectives:
It paints Sanders as a kind of protest candidate who’s just in the race to make a statement, and shouldn’t be taken all that seriously.
It advances Clinton’s argument that she has broader experience and qualifications on many more issues — that she’s more serious than him.
It implies to women and nonwhite voters that Sanders just doesn’t care about issues important to them all that much.
It portrays Sanders’s diagnosis of what ails America — mainly the influence of big money — as simplistic.
It’s a reason Sanders shouldn’t be the nominee that doesn’t require people who like him (as many Democrats and even Clinton supporters do) to stop liking him.
And, unlike many of Clinton’s other arguments against Sanders, it has the ring of truth to it — Sanders really does bring up Wall Street, corporations, and the wealthy in his answers to practically every question (in this debate he said he’d improve race relations by getting rid of “tax breaks to billionaires”). And he seems less comfortable when he discusses other topics.
The ring of truth in the last paragraph is the issue here. When do debate moments stick? When they are proven true in the debate. Christie’s criticism of Rubio as just a robot who repeats the same lines over and over again stuck because Rubio then spent the debate repeating his lines over and over again. Clinton’s critique of Sanders as a single issue candidate sticks because Sanders spent the debate repeating his same issue over and over again.
I am going to be taking the advice of this next column, “Feel the Bern or Give ’em Hill, but please, chill out“, by Mark Morford, because I got a little heated in comments yesterday over this primary, and I didn’t like myself for it. The article mostly addresses over zealous Bernie supporters, but the point also applies to over zealous Hillary supporters, so I will take the point and tone it down.
Darrell M. West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution describes turnout for both parties as “healthy,” presaging a high-turnout election in November.