DEMOCRATIC DEBATE IV: SHOOTING THE ARROWS IN A DIFFERENT DIRECTION

The fourth debate of the 2020 Democratic presidential nominating contest looked somewhat like the three that preceded it – candidates behind brightly colored

Democratic Candidates of Dabate Four

PhotoCred: The Daily Dot

lecterns, well known media figures asking the questions, and a live audience made up mostly of Democratic true believers who knew the applause lines. At the end, the pundit class proclaimed several participants as big winners, but said the race wouldn’t change much as a result of the evening’s proceedings on an obscure college campus in Ohio.

Looks deceive sometimes. This debate was very different from the ones that took place earlier in Miami, Detroit, and Houston. The difference lay in who got hunted, which showed how much the race has changed, just in the month since the September debate in Houston.

In the earlier events, former Vice President Joe Biden

served as prey for the other candidates. California Senator Kamala Harris, for example, got a big polling boost (which faded) from taking on Biden about school busing and his record on racial issues during  his long career in the United States Senate. Former Housing Secretary Julian Castro tackled Biden’s immigration record while serving in the Obama administration. Others also took shots at Biden during those first three debates.

All About Warren

Moving up in the polls and becoming a front runner

- maybe THE front runner – comes with a price. Elizabeth Warren paid that price in the fourth debate. When the Massachusetts senator took a narrow lead in some national polls and several polls in early primary states, it became clear she’d receive incoming fire on the debate stage. Her competitors didn’t disappoint.

South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar challenged Warren on her support for Medicare for all. Buttigieg said Warren should support “Medicare for all who want it,” warning of the political danger in forcing millions of Americans off private health insurance plans they like. Klobuchar essentially accused Warren of being untruthful about how she'd pay for her health  care plan when Klobuchar praised Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for "being honest here"  about "where we're going to send the invoice."  Warren stuck to her guns, not budging on her plan.

Harris went after Warren for refusing to join her demand that Twitter deactivate President Trump’s account for alleged violations of its terms of service guidelines. Other candidates challenged Warren on foreign policy. Former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke accused Warren of being punitive toward people on whom she wants to impose higher taxes. The hits just kept on coming.

How’d She Hold Up?

Warren had to get used to the attacks. It’s probably not fair to say she was thrown off her game, but her first responses indicated some discomfort in her new role. As the debate went on, however, Warren rebounded, taking the criticism in stride. To her credit, she never attacked her attackers in anything even suggesting a personal rebuke.

Warren will have to get used to being the hunted if she holds her spot in the polls as the race moves toward the first primaries early next year. The criteria for the next debate will likely exclude some of the 12 candidates who appeared on the stage in Ohio. If that’s the case, those remaining must find ways of distinguishing themselves from the three leaders –Warren, Sanders, and Biden. Generally, political candidates don’t knock votes off another candidate without some kind of attack. As long as Warren stays at the front of the pack, she will take hits.

What’s the Long-Term Plan?

Some political observers have suggested Warren’s end game involves a calculated move toward the center if she gets nominated. These observers say, for example, she won’t give all the details of how she plans on paying for her health care plan because she wants “wiggle room” for the general election campaign. Perhaps, this analysis goes, she’ll suggest she’s open to something less than a single payer health care system that gets rid of all private insurance, maybe a public option that builds on the Affordable Care Act. That might keep her from alienating, in particular, union members who’ve bargained for health insurance they’d hate giving up.

In post-debate spin room interviews Warren, predictably, denied having a “wiggle room” strategy. She contended she’s espousing sincerely held positions she believes serve the nation’s best interests. She can’t say anything else right now, of course, but if she gets nominated, plenty of the powers that be in the Democratic party will start pulling at her about her boldest (some would say radical) proposals. She and her team will have some hard choices if she prevails in the nomination fight and takes the stage next summer in Milwaukee as the party’s standard bearer.

Voting hasn’t even started yet, so we’d get way ahead of ourselves in anointing Warren now as the likely nominee. The flavor of the latest debate proved, however, her rivals take the possibility seriously. In going after her they showed they believe they needed to nip the possibility in the bud. It’s game on!

BEHIND THE MID-TERMS: A FIGHT FOR AMERICA’S SOUL

Culture Wars, Self-governance, and America’s Future

In 1837, as Doris Kearns Goodwin writes in her new

book, Leadership in Turbulent Times (Simon & Schuster 2018), twenty-seven year old Illinois state legislator Abraham Lincoln said the “founding fathers noble experiment – their ambitions to show the world that ordinary people could govern themselves had succeeded” and now it was up to his generation to preserve this “proud fabric” of freedom. Perhaps the 2018 mid-term elections present another challenge to

show the world ordinary people can govern themselves since these elections will determine control of Congress, numerous governships,   and the balance of power in state legislatures in the largely unprecedented circumstances of the Trump presidency.  

This year’s campaign demands examination of two very different political approaches, approaches that will likely continue in the 2020 Presidential campaign, given Donald Trump’s almost certain presence on the ballot. The difference in the approaches of the two major parties generates as much interest for us as any individual campaign. Which wins will say much about the social, political, and cultural direction of the country in the next few years. Woodson would go so far as to say “who prevails will speak to the capacity of ordinary people to govern themselves and decide who benefits from democracy and who does not.” In any event, the elections reflect a battle for the nation’s soul. 

  

Some background reading

Two books provide a good starting point for understanding what’s going in the 2018 campaign -- What’sthe Matter With Kansas by Thomas Frank (Holt & Co. 2004) and That Used to be Us by Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2011). Frank’s book reveals the game plan for most Republicans. Democrats, at least many of them, are trying to follow the advice laid out by Friedman and Mandelbaum. 

 

In a nutshell, What’s the Matter With Kansas details how Republicans have persuaded many white, low and middle income Americans to vote against their economic  interests. Rather than supporting candidates who favor tax, wage, and government spending policies that benefit them, these voters have often helped elect candidates who oppose those policies. They pass tax cuts tilted toward the rich, nominate and confirm judges who favor corporate interests at the expense of workers and consumers, and reject as too expensive infrastructure and job training programs that provide work for ordinary people or help them cope with the effects of globalization. Republicans have accomplished this by running cultural issue campaigns that appeal to the fears of low and middle income white America.

That Used to be Us isn’t as direct as What’s the Matter With Kansas and it’s not as much a template for Democratic campaigns. Nevertheless, the policy prescriptions in That Used to be Us on issues like health care, infrastructure, immigration, and economic innovation form the foundation for many Democratic campaigns we’ve seen this year and some Democratic gubernatorial campaigns.

The campaigns we have

As the election draws near, Republican use of the What’s the Matter With Kansas playbook has become all the more apparent. Increasingly, GOP television commercials rely on fear of hordes of brown people pouring across the southern border. Many ads are deceptive, implicitly or explicitly racist, and anti-democratic. Some Republicans, for example, present disingenuous positions on the

Affordable  Care Act, claiming support for its popular requirement that insurers cover pre-existing conditions, while signing on to lawsuits attacking that very provision or opposing it in Congress. Others run anti-immigration ads that dog whistle to whites worried about brown people coming to the United States from Latin America, supposedly bent on taking over the country.   

   

Republican candidates are not running on the 2017 tax cut (which is generally unpopular, given it’s favorability toward the wealthy) or the relatively good economy. Instead, Republicans invoke images of “uppity” (black) National Football League players

disrespecting the flag by kneeling during the national anthem, gangs of Hispanic youth terrorizing American citizens, and fears sensible gun safety laws will result in hunters losing their guns. Republicans ride that horse, hoping it takes them across the finish line first. They also now rig the system in places like Georgia, Texas, and North Dakota by changing voting rules, intending on suppressing the black, brown, and Native American vote. 

    

PhotCred: BrennanCenter.org

Democrats emphasize health care, especially pushing Medicaid expansion in states that declined that opportunity when introduced as part of the Affordable Care Act, economic wage fairness through a $15 minimum wage, and a transportation and infrastructure program that includes government funding for road and bridge repairs. Even if Friedman and Mandelbaum didn’t support every one of these polices in That Used to be Us, the book advocated the kind of bold governmental action underlying many of them because the authors saw the United States falling behind the rest of the world in innovation and economic development. 

A sign of just how different an approach the parties take in 2018 resides in the fact Democrats seldom campaign on immigration policy (except opposing splitting up immigrant families at the border) while few Republicans leave aggressive anti-immigration enforcement out of their pitch. Something has to give.

Who wins?

On the eve of the election, polls suggest Democrats will take the House, Republicans will hold a narrow Senate majority, and the intriguing gubernatorial races remain too close to call. Such a split decision would fit with our polarized politics. Regardless of who wins, however, the question of which approach best serves America won’t go away. Abraham Lincoln said America reached a point in the 19^th Century where the nation was called upon and succeeded in showing the world ordinary men and women could govern themselves. It seems we have reached such a point again, though Rob thinks that while we’re approaching that kind of crossroads, we’re not quite there yet. 

We want to know what you think.