Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Democrats in fourth debate throw punches at Warren
WESTERVILLE, Ohio — Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s rivals repeatedly jabbed at her during Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate, accusing the senator from Massachusetts of ducking questions about the costs of Medicare for All universal health insurance and her signature “wealth tax” plan.
The crowded field of candidates is looking to deny President Donald Trump a second term. Former Vice President Joe Biden, who has led the Democratic field for months, addressed Trump’s accusations of wrongdoing by him and his son in Ukraine, and by and large avoided confrontation with his rivals.
Mostly out of the fray was Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who spent the past two weeks recuperating at his home after a heart attack. He made no stumbles but didn’t show the same fire as in previous debates. He got applause when he thanked supporters and rivals
More moderate Democrats, like Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, pounced, calling for an approach that stops short of fully government funded health care.
“I appreciate Elizabeth’s work but, again, the difference between a plan and a would see their taxes go up, but they would save money overall because of the way health care would be restructured.
“Premiums are gone, co-payments are gone, deductibles are gone, all out-ofpocket expenses are gone,” Sanders said, adding, “The
tax increase they pay will be substantially less, substantially less than what they were paying for premiums and outof-pocket expenses.”
But Sanders more forcefully scolded the candidates onstage who opposed single-payer care and whom he described as “defending a system which is dysfunctional, which is cruel.”
The debate touched on foreign policy, too, a subject that has dominated the news in recent weeks as Trump said he was withdrawing most U.S. forces from Syria and then Turkey invaded the northern part of the country to attack Kurdish fighters. The Democratic presidential candidates denounced the president for abandoning Kurdish forces there, who are U.S. allies.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who served in Iraq with the Army, questioned the need for U.S. involvement in “regime change” conflicts in the Middle East. That prompted Buttigieg to respond: “What we are doing or what we were doing in Syria was keeping our word.”
“I would have a hard time today looking an Afghan civilian or soldier in the eye after what just happened over there,” said Buttigieg, who served in Afghanistan. “It is undermining the honor of our soldiers. You take away the honor of our soldiers, you might as well go after their body armor next.”
On the opioid crisis, many of the Democrats said they would lead administrations that would go after drug companies that manufacture addictive opioid medications.
Sen. Kamala Harris of California said she would prosecute pharmaceutical executives as “high-level dope dealers” for peddling what they knew to be dangerously addictive medications. President Barack Obama’s former Housing Secretary, Julian Castro, said drug companies need to “be held accountable.”
That sentiment was backed by Sanders, who said the companies’ actions are evidence of “what unfettered capitalism is doing to this country” by way of the massive profits made by pharmaceutical companies.
Businessman Andrew Yang and former Congressman Beto O’Rourke of Texas said they support decriminalizing small amounts of opioid drugs as a way to promote safe use.
Biden had spent months facing sharp criticism from the rest of the field during debates, but he saw few candidates engage with him Tuesday. Still, he struggled to fully explain why his newly promised ethics plan to prevent conflicts of interest involving his relatives wasn’t applied to his son Hunter when Hunter was hired in 2014 as a director for a Ukrainian energy company.
That relationship has become a focal point of Trump’s effort to press for a Ukrainian government investigation of the Bidens — an effort that was a major factor leading to the House impeachment inquiry into Trump.
On Sunday, Biden had vowed that “no one in my family will have an office in the White House, will sit in on meetings as if they’re a Cabinet member, will in fact have any business relationship with anyone that relates to a foreign corporation or a foreign country.”
But CNN anchor Anderson Cooper asked, “If it’s not OK for a president’s family to be involved in foreign businesses, why was it OK for your son when you were vice president?”
Biden said, “My son did nothing wrong, I did nothing wrong.”
Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, who in previous debates took on Biden in pointed terms, instead scolded the moderators for even asking Biden about his son’s work in Ukraine.
“The only person sitting at home enjoying that was Donald Trump,” said Booker, lamenting what he called “elevating a lie and attacking a statesman.”
O’Rourke and Buttigieg exchanged sharp words over O’Rourke’s proposed mandatory buyback of assault rifles.
Buttigieg last week criticized the idea as a “shiny object” that distracts from more achievable efforts such as universal background checks and banning the sale of the weapons and high-capacity magazines.
On Tuesday, Buttigieg criticized O’Rourke as not having a plan for how the buyback would work.
O’Rourke said the different ideas are not mutually exclusive. He says gun violence “is a crisis, and we gotta do something about it,” adding that candidates should listen to victims, not polls, consultants and focus groups.
Buttigieg shot back, saying, “I don’t need lessons from you on courage, political or personal.”
Still, most of the backand-forth focused on Warren. Taking aim at her proposal to tax the wealthiest Americans, Klobuchar said, “I want to give a reality check here” and O’Rourke suggested it was “punitive.”
The senator said that notion shocked her: “I don’t have a beef with billionaires.”
“Look, I understand that this is hard, but I think as Democrats we are going to succeed when we dream big and fight hard, not when we dream small and quit before we get started,” Warren said.
Hosted by CNN and The New York Times, the field’s fourth round of debates was the largest-ever. It took place on the campus of Otterbein University, just outside Columbus. Ohio is one of the nation’s toughest electoral battlegrounds, but also a state that has long helped decide presidential elections. It has drifted away from Democrats in recent years.