Did Biden win the debate? Well, he didn’t fall down
So, who won the Democratic debates?
My vote is for Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Sure they were both on Day 1, but nobody on Day 2 came close.
Unless you figure that Joe Biden triumphed by failing to fall down. Some of his answers might have been a bit muddled, and he sort of faded off after the first hour. But expectations were so low, that was like clearing a high hurdle.
Everybody looked forward to his meeting with Kamala Harris, who had tortured him so effectively in Debate 1. “Go easy on me, kid,” Biden told her when they shook hands. It was either typical niceguy Joe or yet another moment of Not Getting It by a former vice president who doesn’t know you don’t call a female member of the U.S. Senate “kid.”
You pick.
Biden had a double challenge. The progressives were laying into him about his Mr. Moderate agenda, and everybody was reminding him of his sometimes-grimy decades of life as a classic Senate deal-making insider. All that history, from Biden’s perspective, was washed away in his eight years of hanging around with Barack Obama.
“We’re in a battle for the soul of America,” he said in one of his best moments, which just involved repeating something he tells his audiences all the time. If Donald Trump got re-elected, Biden warned, “the America we know will no longer exist.”
The specter of You Know Who was looming behind everything. Everybody knew that the only thing that really mattered was getting rid of Donald Trump, who was having a typical week of doing his best to ruin the country.
Twenty candidates over two days, and only a handful had any real business being on the stage. Listening to Bill de Blasio rant and preen, the nation got a good hint of why no mayor of New York has ever been elected president. Harris totally failed to live up to expectations, and sort of floundered on the health care front.
The star of the first night was Warren.
Anybody stand out on Night 2? Well, Cory Booker did a good job of defending himself against Biden’s attacks on his record as mayor of Newark. “Mr. Vice President, there is a saying in my community — you are dipping into the Kool-Aid and you don’t even know the flavor,” he rejoined at one point. It was not the most impressive part of his argument, but it was pretty much the best quote of the night. Except for Kirsten Gillibrand’s announcement that the first thing she’d do as president is “Clorox the Oval Office.”
Let’s have another debate with just Warren versus Biden. And maybe we’ll throw in Booker and Bernie Sanders. Sanders was the other top firstnight performer. And definitely the loudest of the field of 20. Is that a good thing? If voters are looking for change, will they be excited about a guy who’s really into shouting? It certainly made an impact — Representative Tim Ryan will mainly be remembered for telling Sanders, “You don’t have to yell.”
The next round is scheduled for September, in a week that begins with Grandparents Day and ends with a full moon.
At the end, two ways of looking at the latest debates. They weren’t, well ... stirring. Viewers on CNN who made it through the nearly five hours deserved a medal reading, “I stayed awake until Jake Tapper said good night.”
On the other hand, you had 20 candidates, and at least a dozen or so seemed as if they’d be pretty good chief executives. And 20 of whom would be a huge improvement on the status quo.