WARREN SNUBS BERN
Quickly pulls back hand as fellow lib puts his out to shake
On a night none of the six Democrats onstage in Iowa did anything to break away from the pack, the most interesting moment came after the debate — when Elizabeth Warren pulled back from Bernie Sanders’ attempted handshake.
The two longtime friends, their party’s progressive standard-bearers in the presidential race, have been at odds since Monday over a 2018 conversation during which she claims Sanders told her that a woman couldn’t win the general election.
They disagreed over the issue again during Tuesday night’s debate.
Afterward, Warren greeted former Vice President Joe Biden warmly, shaking his hand and patting him on the arm.
She then approached Sanders, and he extended his hand — only to see her pull hers back and clench it into a fist.
They then exchanged words — and it was clear neither was smiling.
Earlier, the matter made for a rare notable moment during a debate that left undecided voters in next month’s crucial Iowa Democratic caucus knowing they’ll have to keep looking
“I didn’t say it,” insisted Sanders, of Vermont. “Anybody [who] knows me knows that it’s incomprehensible that I would think that a woman cannot be president of the United States.”
Warren offered a different recollection of their December 2018 closeddoor meeting. She insisted that a woman could defeat President Trump in November — and she came prepared with stats to prove it.
“I disagreed,” the Massachusetts lawmaker said, affirming that Sanders did, in fact, make the remark.
“But look, this question about whether or not a woman can be president has been raised, and it’s time for us to attack it head on.
“Look at the men on this stage: Collectively they have lost 10 elections,” she continued, referring to Sanders, former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Biden.
“The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they’ve been in are the women.”
The argument drew one of the night’s few vocal reactions from the crowd at
Drake University in Des Moines — and kudos from Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the other woman onstage Tuesday night who shared Warren’s unbeaten record.
“I hear that. People have said it [to me],” said Klobuchar, referring to remarks like the one Sanders purportedly made.
“I point out that you don’t have to be tallest person in the world — James Madison [who was the nation’s fourth president] was 5-foot-4.
“You don’t have to be the skinniest person in the room. You don’t have to be the loudest person,” Klobuchar continued. “You have to be competent.”
The team-up with Warren was one of few standout moments for Klobuchar, who in last month’s debate made moves to scramble up the polls, including by tangling with Buttigieg on his lack of experience on the national stage.
Buttigieg had a relatively anonymous debate night, neither drawing as much flak from the field as he did in December, nor swinging for the fences with the Iowa caucus coming up on Feb. 3.
That was somewhat surprising for the former mayor, the lone military veteran on stage, during the debate’s first quarter, which was dominated by foreign policy.
The debate was the first held since already-high tensions between the United States and Iran was ratcheted up further by the US drone attack that killed Iranian Lt. Gen. Qassem Soleimani and the retaliatory missile strike by Iran on two Iraqi airbases quartering American troops.
Warren broke from her onstage competitors by calling for a total withdrawal of US combat troops from the Middle East. “We’ve turned the corner so many times, we’re going in circles in these regions,” she said of repeatedly dashed assurances that a US military victory was near.
On the prospect of a summit with North Korean despot Kim Jong-un, Biden said that “absent preconditions, I would not meet with the, quote, supreme leader who said Joe
Biden is a ‘rabid dog’ who should be beaten with a stick,” referring to a remark circulated by the Hermit Kingdom’s state-run media.
“Other than that, you like him?” cracked Sanders, in a fleeting moment of crowd-pleasing levity.
If Biden, Warren, Sanders, Buttigieg and Klobuchar didn’t break away from the pack, they at least played the hits. The same could not be said for the night’s sixth candidate, billionaire hedge-funder Tom Steyer, whose political inexperience continued to leave him doeeyed and tongue-tied amid the field of heavyweights.
WHEN the Democratic debate started Tuesday night, I was young, carefree, merry. Two hours later, when it ended, I was praying to the Almighty for a swift end to my suffering. I felt like I was 103 years old — or even older, like one of the early patriarchs in the Bible. All the life had been sucked out of my body.
This, the seventh debate in seven months, was the dullest major political event in years.
And there is no excuse for that, since there were only six candidates on stage and, therefore, a real possibility that the Democrats could explore their differences with one another and draw sharp divisions. After all, the first voting will take place in Iowa in only 19 days.
President Trump may have degraded our national discourse with his debate hijinks in 2015 and 2016, but to my surprise, I found myself longing for one of these exhaustingly boring Democrats to call someone else’s wife ugly or say someone else’s father had killed JFK — just to help me stay awake.
Amy Klobuchar almost jolted me to life when she had a near-disastrous moment, forgetting the name of Kansas’ governor the way 2012’s Rick Perry forgot the name of the third Cabinet department he swore he would close down. But she recovered at the end. That was lucky for her but terrible for me, as I slumped again into somnolence.
Maybe the problem is that, as the debate’s opening section on
Iran revealed, most of the candidates are close to being functionally pacifistic.
They were tripping over themselves to condemn Trump’s strike on Iran’s military chief before declaring their intention either to pull all our troops from the Middle East or almost all of our troops from the Middle East.
Combat troops aren’t the answer, they said. They were prepared to be commander in chief because they care about health care for veterans or education for veterans, which is lovely but really doesn’t address the question of how they would confront threats to the United States of the sort posed by the Tehran regime.
Maybe their lack of national combativeness has infected their debating skills and made them unable to confront each other during this debate, because you would never really know there was a contest here one of them is going to have to win — which means the others have to lose.
The only candidate the weird politesse on the stage in Iowa Tuesday night really benefited was Joe Biden, who wasn’t especially sharp but whose entire candidacy is based on the proposition that he is the calm, wise grandfather who can restore normalcy to America.
Former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg had nothing to say. Tom Steyer had a lot to say, and trust me, you wanted him to stop saying it. Klobuchar once again seemed smart and collected . . . and the opposite of compelling.
Given how ineffective Elizabeth Warren was last night — you’ll hear she really had a great moment talking about how women win elections and men don’t, but, you know what, it really wasn’t — the only real contrast with Biden was Bernie Sanders.
Which means, quite simply, if you want passion and heat, you can go for Sanders, who once again was simple and clear and energetic and so far off the charts leftward you could almost hear the ghost of Fidel Castro whispering in his ear to cool it a little.
And if you don’t need that, or that turns you off, or that threatens you, Biden is right there to take your vote and make whatever promises you want him to make that he will stop the crazy in Washington.
Can he? Biden has some pretty crazy qualities that he has been muting, with rather more success than any of us anticipated, throughout this race. The only real question is whether he can stand up to Trump. One of the moderators asked him that question last night and he said Trump’s been going after him for a year and he’s still standing. Oh, please. Joe ain’t seen nothing yet.
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