Democratic Presidential Debate: Night Two Post-Mortem
My quick take:
The Big Winner: Kamala Harris. She would make Trump look even worse than she made Biden look.
Winner: Pete Buttigieg. Unlike Beto. he looked like he belonged. Could you imagine an Indiana face-off with Mike Pence? Definitely could be the Veep with Warren or Harris.
Big Loser: Bernie. I’m sorry, I love him, but he just seemed off his feed tonight. I think his time has passed, and I think he is beginning to suspect it. Great closing, though.
Almost As Big A Loser: Biden. Once Harris nailed him, he lost it. Obama nostalgia can only take him so far. He was not the most electable person on the stage, and that was his claim for front-runner status.
Loser: Gillibrand. She may or may not be the strongest voice for women in the campaign, as she claims. But she’s not in the same league as Warren and Harris.
Non-Entities: Everybody else. Except perhaps for Sen. Bennet, who called out Biden by pointing out that one of Biden’s touted supposed accomplishments actually extended the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
What do you think?
Unfortunately the biggest winner of the debates was Donald Trump.
Brilliant analysis. He must really be looking forward to debating a Kamala Harris onstage.
Your take on Harris is spot on. She will make Trump look terrible and it will drive him nuts, which is a bonus.
Could you imagine if/when she goes after him for being a serial rapist?
Serial rapist? Hope she has back up to support such a ridiculous claim.
Stat is just out of a cave. Poor chap.
Why would she need it? Everyone knows.
you mean other than his on-tape confession?
^This^
STFU
In no particular order:
Biden was a soft target for Harris; he had presumably been coached not to push back too strongly at any female candidate so as not to provoke a #patriarchy! social media response. Trump will be under no such constraint.
Democrats keep falling for the “ending private health insurance” trap. We have public education but we still have private schools. Same should be for health care. A robust and affordable public option would eventually end private insurance anyway without a ban.
The high deductibles for ACA plans have to go. They are not affordable.
The first debate: What a surprise that the corporate media found the pro-Wall Street, pro-charter school candidate to be the winner.
The moderators’ gotcha game was disgraceful. Candidates should have been coached with responses to shut it down (and some did).
These “debates” seem designed to inflict as much damage on each candidate as possible. The “show of hands” questions, for example, are explicitly designed to drain the proceedings of meaning and create wingnut talking points.
Congrats Democrats! Here we go again.
Here is my debate prep tip, during the next “show of hands” question do the opposite of what everyone on the stage is doing. If they are raising their hands, lower yours. If all hands are down, put yours up.
You’ll be instantly given two minutes to say that you are not taking part in these types of “dumbing down” questions. “The country has had enough of dumbing down.”
Related to the “show of hands” question and even more stupid is the idiotic “one-word answer” question that Chuck Todd loves:
What the fuck was the point of that? So stupid.
Let’s not forget that over privileged Chuck Todd has only a high school education. He cut that corner decades ago and has had only mediocre ideas since then.
He was promoted from the number-crunching department after they put him on the air on election night one year, I forget when.
A lack of a college degree is not his big problem. Lack of imagination is.
I think he suffers from a lack of self-discipline.
Really leaning into that “liberal elitist” stereotype I see.
If you think that four more years of education would have improved Chuck Todd’s ideas, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Really! I assume you do not have a college degree.
What of it? Donald Trump has one, so what’s the actual value?
Why does DNC keep giving the debate gig to millionaire corporate media types?
Because these are entertainment spectacles that have no bearing on who would make the best candidate. These aren’t the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
I guess my question contained its own answer.
Yeah, I have a bad habit of answering rhetorical questions.
Pete Buttigieg did a great job highlighting the bankrupt sham that is GOP “Christianity”
He did indeed. And although I know it was a planned stunt (isn’t everything at a “debate”?) I enjoyed hearing a politician finally take a degree of ownership by saying he “didn’t get it done” with regard to racist cops.
Stat is scared or he wouldn’t be here repeating Fox News dumbassery.
Back in the 70’s the Democrats still had segregationists in their ranks, left over from the traditional Democratic platform. This orchestrated hit job on Biden probably won’t stand. Kamala the home-wrecker is a fraud.
Does Biden have to pick her as his VP now?
Won’t stand? Gimme a break. He has no response, because there isn’t one. He was pandering to racists then, and he’ll pander to them now. Wake up and smell the rotting corpse. If he can’t stand up to Harris, how’s he going to stand up to Trump? Fuck, at this point Joe Biden IS the Democrats’ Trump.
So you are saying that the VP of the first black President, who helped that first black President “evolve” to accept basic LGBTQ rights like gay marriage, is a racist now ?
Why wasn’t he a racist back then?
For the same reason Washington is on the dollar bill. Definition ain’t fixed. I’m so sorry about this.
Well, that would be something if Joe was branded a racist after first labeling Trump as a racist during the official Biden campaign announcement.
I said he was pandering to racists. Read more closely, please.
Home-wrecker? Since you employ name-calling, I have one for you: dumb-ass.
This charge has long since been debunked:
https://www.truthorfiction.com/sen-kamala-harris-affair-married-man-used-launch-career-mostly-fiction/
I know I’ll take a hit from Alby for my slavish devotion to moral/ethical consistency …. but If Harris is “home-wrecker” what in the hell does that make Trump? Suddenly you have a concern about the morality with which someone conducts their private life? And let’s get sidetracked with a nice, long discussion of fraud. I’m sure Trump will fare extremely well. Just ask John Barron.
HIs minions mimic Trump’s method of slinging this mud even though he’s guilty of the same things. When a guy lives in a puddle, he’s gonna throw mud.
For the uninitiated, ‘John Barron’ was one of Trump’s aliases. ‘John’ was always around to sing Donald’s praises. Strange but true.
He’s also the co-star of Ruben Bolling’s intermittent series of “Donald and John” cartoons about “a boy president and his imaginary publicist,” done in pitch-perfect imitation of Bill Watterson’s “Calvin and Hobbes.” Bolling was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
https://boingboing.net/2018/04/25/another-calvinesque-and-hobbes.html
wow. Maybe the most desperate comment from RSE I’ve read in these pages. (And I’ve read a lot of desperate comments.)
I need to come clean. I orchestrated the hit on Biden.
I mean he did make a great ‘states rights’ argument for segregation. That was pretty cool. What century is this?
The last century of civilization.
After re-watching the second night my big winner has to be New Zealand.
We have our parents’ racist generation right here in Delaware to blame for Biden’s opposition to busing. Now the children of those racist voters happily put their own kids on the bus to the segregated CSW and Cab.
Having lived through busing I have very mixed feelings about it. I certainly don’t think it’s a simple issue and there is no clear right or wrong for me. And I don’t have kids, but I can’t blame anyone for wanting their children to attend good schools. I need more to go one than someone’s stance on busing for me to label them a racist.
I guess I feel like busing isn’t even close to my first choice if I’m reaching for a weapon to beat up on Biden with.
Google a video of Biden talking about bulldozing “crack houses”.
Or how about him arguing for the crime bill – the one about harsh sentences. That’s a classic.
Or the letter he wrote to James Eastland. Google that one. It’s very good.
Biden gave Strom Thurmond’s eulogy.
Here’s a secret. The little slips that Biden does that people think are endearing (because they all do it too)… Like 7-11 Indians, Obama is clean and articulate, etc.?
Yeah, man I have bad news. That’s all racist.
Integration was connected to “bad schools”. That’s the trick. The bigger trick is that it goes unnoticed.
Or maybe they’re all coincidences
Did you hear me defending Biden? 🙂 Because I wasn’t. I’m just not willing to boil down something as complicated as a parent’s feelings about busing to a Boolean value of racist or not-racist. And part of my ambivalence is exactly what Alby said – minorities wanting their kids to go to good schools too. Or as was the case with me, slightly less shitty schools.
I get that. And if the only racial issue with Biden was busing, he might be able to make a case for himself.
The thing about Biden, though, is that he was basically a federal version of former state senator Tom Sharp. Sharp wanted a return of the whipping post, Biden wanted to dump every black drug user in jail. They both appealed to the same constituency: white construction trade racists.
Only difference is that Biden lied about it. Sharp didn’t.
I think it carries more weight with minorities, who want their kids to go to good schools, too.
Broad “convention wisdom” folklore.
Cab isn’t segregated. It’s 58% white, 13% black, 13% Asian, 10% Latinx, 6% multi-racial.
CSW isn’t either, technically, but mostly because it has the highest percentage of Asians of any school in the state: 52% white, 32% Asian, 8% black, 5% Latinx, 2% multi-racial.
https://reportcard.doe.k12.de.us/detail.html#aboutpage?scope=school&district=32&school=286
I think there’s a lot to the notion of better schools that doesn’t have anything to do with education. Seen?
I was most impressed with Buttigieg. He got a couple of questions designed to make him falter and he answered them in a reasonable manner. I was not as impressed with Harris as everyone else. Let’s face it, Biden is a sitting duck up there. He’s got 50 years worth of wind sock positions to go after. Maybe that was just the opening salvo.
The biggest losers again were the moderators. 10 people is too many, they were like whales at that one hole in the ice trying to get a breath. Maybe keeping them in line was mission impossible but at least tell the audience to shut up. Every time they had to wait for 5 or 10 seconds for the audience to subside was time wasted. Hold it in an empty studio next time.