As genuinely exciting and often substantive as the Las Vegas Democratic debate was last week, the South Carolina debate last night was just an unholy mess.
Bloomberg – slightly better at presenting himself, although that’s not saying much. His best moment, if you want to call it that, was admitting that what works in New York won’t necessarily work in the rest of the country, saying “otherwise you’d have a Naked Cowboy in every city.” This joke went down like the proverbial lead balloon, and those of us who know who Naked Cowboy is probably all agree we’d rather have him running against Trump than most of the people on stage.
Biden – clearly NOT PUTTING UP WITH ANY MORE SHIT and DOESN’T CARE if he yells. It might even work.
Buttigieg – not only told billionaires he’d raise their taxes, but made a case against the Senate filibuster by pointing out how Strom Thurmond used it to defend segregation. He said this in South Carolina.
If there is anything more brave than being an openly gay man running for president, it’s that.
Klobuchar – was asked what the biggest misconception is about her and she responded “that people think I’m boring.”
How can you be in Dunning-Kruger Effect while being made aware you’re in Dunning-Kruger Effect?
Warren – got that much more in Bloomberg’s face, using her own history of motherhood to confront him with the second-hand accusation that he’d told a pregnant employee to “kill it” because her condition inconvenienced him. Bloomberg insisted the incident never happened and when moderators asked how she could prove the woman’s opinion, Warren just said, “her words.” I am not sure this approach helped her or not.
Steyer – I am not sure what he’s even doing here, but between the two billionaires he seems less clueless and less harmful than Bloomberg.
Sanders – really seems to underestimate the threat he created for himself in praising communist governments like Castro Cuba, underestimates the degree to which the moderate Democrats (still the majority) are alienated by that, and how much they can weaponize such comments, because you know damn well if they don’t, the Republicans will. I mean yeah, you’re a Democratic Socialist. As Elizabeth Warren would say, good for you. But if democratic socialism is NOT the same thing as Leninism, it follows that you don’t need to present a Leninist government as a positive example. If you’re going to count EU nations, Israel, even Costa Rica as socialist countries, it follows that you could point to examples of socialism working WITHOUT putting gay people and religious dissidents in prison.
Of course, given Trump’s praise for dictators, and Bloomberg saying at this very debate that China’s Xi Jinping is NOT a dictator, maybe Sanders thought he could get away with it.
CBS: What’s the grade below F? G? H? Gayle King and Norah O’Donnell kept complaining about the candidates not respecting the rules of the debates, which didn’t actually mean they enforced them. Nobody seemed to know what was going on. “This is the last segment of our debate. No, we’ve got time for one more break.” [back from commercial] “That concludes our debate.”
What was the difference between this schoolyard fight and the MSNBC debate? I guess with TV, you get what you pay for.