We'll note right up front that there's far better political coverage of the debates just about everywhere on the internet right now, and that you probably have your own opinions of what happened the past two nights during the second round of Democratic debates, but as the ROM has nothing better to do with his time (now that he's finally got his car back), he watched both nights in their entirety and offers the following observations.
To be honest here, he's still undecided. While we agree that anyone, even a feces-flinging monkey, would make a better President than the person currently in office, we don't yet have a preferred candidate in the over-crowded Democratic field. There's some that we like more than others, but at this point no one has yet leapt out from the pack to capture our hearts and minds. Any one of the 20-plus candidates would make a far, far better president that Dumbledorf Pumpernickel, but that's setting the bar pretty damn low.
So, what's probably the most important feature of the candidates to us is electability. An electoral loss to the incumbent in 2020 would be a disaster which we can't allow to happen, so we need a candidate who's assured to beat the so-called "president" in the next election. We care less about their policy positions, plans, platforms, and politics than about their electability. Most of the candidates are really not all that far apart from each other with regard to the issues, and besides, it's Congress that actually writes the rules and votes to pass them - even the most dazzling policies of any Democratic contender won't matter if we don't have a Democratic House and Senate to support them, and the moderates wouldn't necessarily veto a progressive bill placed on their desk even if they didn't dare to campaign on that issue. No, to us the words only matter in so far as they allow us to gauge that candidate's idea of what could get him or her elected.
So while we consider ourselves progressive or even radical liberal Democrats, we have some sympathy for the moderates' position that campaigning on a "Medicare For All" platform, along with a ban on private health insurance, may hurt the Democrats in the long run. The opposition will be able to truthfully claim, "they're going to take your health care away," and the progressives' response of "yes, to replace it with something better" won't be believed - the American electorate has fallen for bait-and-switch promises before, and the election of the current "president" shows they no longer trust mainstream politicians to act in a meaningful way on their behalf.
One of our criticisms of the left in general and the Democrats in particular is their lack of confidence in the strengths of the free market (one of our criticisms of the right in general and the Republicans in particular is their over-reliance on free markets). We believe that if Medicare was available for all, or at least much more widely available than now, and allowed to compete with private insurance plans, either most people would select Medicare and the private market would dry up, or the private market would competitively develop more cost-effective and protective policies and the current problems with the private plans would get corrected. But despite all the problems with current health-care plans and insurance, and despite people's frustration and complaints about the status quo, to campaign on a platform that we're going to take away your private health insurance and even your employer-paid health-care plan is probably the best way to assure that the current "president" gets re-elected.
Until Sanders and Warren get this, this radical progressive can't support the two left-most candidates currently running for President. It's not that we're against Medicare For All, we're against the idea of campaigning on that issue. We don't want the Democratic Party to run the most ideologically pure candidate with the best platform only to lose the election. Let's win back the White House first, and then let the Executive and Legislative branches come up with the best solutions and fixes to our problems.
So that's our editorial bias on watching the debates. Therefore, we found it interesting to watch the first night of the debates as Sanders and Warren acting like Walter White and Jesse Pinkman banding together to fend off the Albuquerque underworld as they formed a pact to fight off the moderates on the stage. Elizabeth Warren in particular, who might otherwise be our preferred candidate, needs to decide if she wants to be the front-runner and the eventual President of the United States of America, or to be just another policy wonk advocating for liberal planks in the Democratic platform, like Bernie was in 2016.
“I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for the president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for,” Warren said at one point much to the approval of the audience. But we don't understand why anybody would go to all the trouble of running for president but not run to win the election.
The front runners on the second night, Biden and Harris, not only didn't stick together Bonnie-and-Clyde style like Sanders and Warren did, but actually continued their attacks on each other. We like Kamala Harris and think that her quick-witted, prosecutorial manner uniquely qualifies her to take on and defeat the incumbent "president," and she's proposing a "phase-in" Medicare-for-All program to run alongside current private plans, but we were frankly disturbed by some of the allegations made against her last night, especially the withering attack by Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii.
This exchange also illustrates the problem with the format of the debate - allowing each candidate only 60 seconds to discuss complex and nuanced issues resulted in the moderators having to stop each candidate from speaking even while they were in the middle of making their point. At the end of Gabbard's first statement, it almost sounds like she's being shut down for getting too real. We almost expected to hear Jake Tapper say, "Okay, that'll be enough out of you, young lady," like some patriarchal Senator at a confirmation hearing. This shortened, sound-bite-sized format seemed designed to pit the candidates against each other and might have made for some good television and lots of meme-worthy moments, but it didn't allow for an intelligent discussion of the issues.
Long-shot candidate Marianne Williamson, whose sole qualification for president seems to be that she knows Orpah, noted this, saying "the entire conversation that we’re having here tonight, if you think any of this wonkiness is going to deal with this dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in this country, then I’m afraid the Democrats are going to see some very dark days." She also delivered a coherent answer to a question about reparations and even put a specific price on her proposal ($200 to $500 billion). She had some great lines and great moments on stage, and her promise of “radical truth-telling” was spot on, but she's a nut and there's no way we're supporting her for president.
Speaking of radical truth-telling, Andrew Yang really told it like it was in his very meta closing statement.
So we're still undecided. Again, any of the candidates will do a better job than the fool now in the Oval Office and several of the candidates won't be on the campaign trial much longer as the heard thins out due to insufficient funding. In the future, we'd like to hear Sanders and Warren talk more like bona fide presidential candidates and less like policy-wonk zealots, we want to hear Harris address the allegations against her, and we'd like Biden to either step up his game and get more coherent or to step down altogether.
If none of those things happen, then we're looking forward to Andrew Yang's $1,000-a-month "freedom dividend" checks to start arriving in the mail. That would really help us out a lot, to be honest.
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