Warren under attack as Democrats spar in largest primary debate in US history
The Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren came under sustained attack by her Democratic rivals during Tuesday night’s presidential debate, a reflection of the threat her ascendant candidacy poses to the crowded field of candidates competing to take on Donald Trump in the 2020 US election.
Twelve Democratic candidates took to the stage in Westerville, Ohio, for the largest presidential primary debate in modern US history, and the first since the launch of an impeachment inquiry into the president’s efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate leading rival Joe Biden.
The debate saw Biden and Warren square up for the first time since she surged into a virtual tie with the former vice-president in many Democratic opinion polls. Yet Warren also found herself the target of barbs from other candidates, mainly from moderates, over her leftwing positions on healthcare, taxes and big tech.
The debate opened with a display of unity over the House of Representatives’ rapidly unfolding impeachment inquiry into Trump, with the Democrats unloading on the “criminal in the White House” and the “the most corrupt and unpatriotic president we’ve ever had”.
Biden, who has been dragged into the impeachment maelstrom by Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that Biden and his son were involved in wrongdoing in Ukraine, defended his conduct as vice-president.
“My son did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong,” Biden said, arguing that Trump’s baseless attacks reveal Trump’s fear of running against him in a general election.
“He’s going after me because he knows if I get the nomination I will beat him like a drum,” Biden said.
There was another rare moment of unity later on after Sanders, 78, the oldest candidate in the field, thanked his supporters and his rivals for their well wishes as he recovered from suffering a heart attack two weeks ago.
“I’m healthy, I’m feeling great,” Sanders said before inviting the audience to attend his Bernie’s Back rally in New York this weekend.
But the ideological divide over healthcare – and the attacks on Warren – flared early in the debate. Several trailing candidates rounded on the Massachusetts senator, who has embraced Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All healthcare plan but, unlike Sanders, has resisted efforts to pin her down how she will pay for the multitrillion-dollar plan.
Sanders has acknowledged that implementing Medicare for All would require raising taxes on middle-class families. Asked explicitly whether she would raise taxes to pay for the plan, Warren again avoided the question, insisting instead that the overall cost Americans pay for healthcare would go down.
Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who escalated his attacks on Warren’s healthcare plan ahead of the debate, seized on her pivot: “We heard it tonight: a yes or no question that did not get a yes or no answer. Your signature, senator, is to have a plan for everything, except for this.”
Warren fired back that Buttigieg’s healthcare plan – “Medicare for All who want it” – was actually “Medicare for all who can afford it” and would leave millions of Americans uninsured.
“At least Bernie is being honest here,” interjected the Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, a moderate who has has not gained traction. “The difference between a plan and a pipe dream is something you can actually get done.”
In a section about Warren’s idea for a wealth tax, Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke said it can appear that Warren is “more focused on being punitive and pitting some part of the country against the other instead of lifting people up”. “I’m really shocked at the notion that anyone thinks I’m punitive,” Warren replied, and then reprised a version of the speech that helped catapult her onto the national stage when she ran for senator in 2012.“You made a fortune in America, you had a great idea, you got out there and worked for it, good for you,” she said. “But you built that fortune in America. And I guarantee you built it in part using workers all of us helped pay to educate.”
In another fiery exchange, the two veterans on the stage, Buttigieg and the Hawaii representative Tulsi Gabbard, clashed over Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Syria, which paved the way for a Turkish military assault on Syrian Kurds.
Gabbard, who has been sharply criticized over a meeting with the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, accused Trump of having the “blood of the Kurds on his hands” but she continued “so do many of the politicians in both parties who supported this regime change war”.
Buttigieg shot back that she was “dead wrong”.
“You can put an end to endless war without embracing Donald Trump’s policy, as you’re doing,” he said.
The New Jersey senator Cory Booker warned that the Democrats risked playing into Trump’s hands: “Tearing each other down because we have different plans is unacceptable. I have seen this script before.”
Tonight’s battle for the Democratic presidential nomination converged on Ohio, with a dozen candidates meeting on stage at Otterbein University in Westerville, an affluent suburb northeast of the state capital, Columbus – making for a crowded debate.
Trump won Ohio by 8.5 percentage points in 2016, the widest margin of any “swing” state. The margin of victory in traditional battleground states is typically much closer, as it was in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, the three midwestern states that delivered Trump the White House.
The 10 candidates who took part in last month’s third debate in Texas all qualified for Tuesday’s event, along with Gabbard and Tom Steyer, a billionaire activist who is making his first debate appearance.
Also participating were the US senators Kamala Harris, former housing secretary Julián Castro, and tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang.
Younger Democratic candidates, including Buttigieg, 37, and Yang, 44, have argued it is time for new leadership in a Democratic party driven by the diverse grassroots energy of younger activists.
Sanders’ health problems highlighted his age and that of the other top White House contenders – Biden is 76 and Warren is 70, while Trump is 73 – in a race featuring a debate about a generational change in leadership.
Addressing the question of age, Warren vowed to “outwork and out-organize and outlast” Trump or “whoever the Republicans get stuck with” as a candidate for the November 2020 election. Biden said he is running in part because of his long record and experience. With age comes wisdom, he said.
The packed stage and tangle of competing story lines created a contentious atmosphere, and the Democraticled congressional impeachment inquiry into the president was a frequent theme.
The impeachment inquiry focuses on Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate his unsubstantiated allegation that Biden improperly tried to aid his son Hunter’s business interests in Ukraine. Trump has repeatedly tried to turn the focus on Biden with vociferous attacks on his integrity. There is no evidence that Biden or his son were involved in illegal activity.
Hunter Biden broke his silence on Tuesday in his first interview since the formal impeachment inquiry into Trump was announced in late September. In the ABC interview, which aired hours before the debate, he admitted to “poor judgment” in taking a paid position in a Ukrainian gas company – but denied doing anything wrong.
Meanwhile, Biden has seen his once solid lead in opinion polls in the Democratic race diminished by Warren who has steadily risen over the past two months.
The Democratic National Committee again will increase the fundraising and polling criteria to qualify for next month’s debate in Georgia. So far, only eight of the 12 candidates participating in Ohio would qualify, according to a CNN analysis. Nineteen contenders remain in the Democratic race overall.