At debate, Democrats show they have their act together
WASHINGTON — At some point during Tuesday night’s Democratic debate, many people in living rooms across the country undoubtedly turned to each other with the same basic thought about Hillary Clinton: Oh, so that’s why she’s the front-runner.
They also experienced something historic: For the first time in the modern political era, Americans got to watch leaders of a mainstream political party debate the relative merits of capitalism and democratic socialism. And for once, socialism was cast not as the ideology that produced a brutal dictatorship in the old Soviet Union, but as a benign and democratic outlook that has created rather attractive societies in places such as Denmark and Sweden.
Whatever happens to Bernie Sanders’ candidacy, he will deserve credit for having widened our political horizons.
Anyone who compares this encounter with the Republican debates will learn a lot. Democrats are far more united than Republicans, who are in a shambles. Democrats are the party of what the political consultants call kitchentable issues — family leave, higher wages and kids being able to afford college — while Republicans are the party of ideology and abstractions.
Clinton won several victories on Tuesday. She was in command throughout and seemed happy to be there. She maintained her good mood and big smile despite repeated challenges from CNN’s questioners, deploying the classic Clinton strategy of insisting the campaign is about what voters need, not what the media and the GOP want to talk about.
This is where her most important victory came, with a key assist from Sanders. The sound bite played over and over was created when Sanders agreed with Clinton: “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.” The crowd exploded into loud applause and raucous cheers. Of course it was a partisan audience, but that is the point. Tuesday marked the moment when the email kerfuffle became a partisan matter.
But the debate’s most substantive contribution was to the larger philosophical argument the country needs to have in 2016. Republicans plainly still believe their central mission is cutting taxes, shredding regulations and shrinking government.
Democrats believe that government has a role to play in solving the problems of unequal opportunity, imbalances between family life and work, concentrated economic power and wage stagnation. Clinton’s best personal moment may have been when she defended mandated paid family leave from the critique advanced by Republican contender Carly Fiorina that it would be an excessive burden on small business.
Clinton went straight at the GOP’s contradictions: “It’s always the Republicans or their sympathizers who say, ‘You can’t have paid leave, you can’t provide health care,’ ” she said. “They don’t mind having big government to interfere with a woman’s right to choose and to try to take down Planned Parenthood. ... We should not be paralyzed by the Republicans and their constant refrain, ‘Big Government this, Big Government that.’ ”
And one way to end this paralysis is to show, as Sanders is doing, that social democratic countries have thrived over the years with far more social provision than we have.
Setting the boundaries of debate is one of the most important tasks in politics. We now have a more realistic sense of the choices before us: Sanders’ unapologetic democratic socialism, Clinton’s progressive capitalism and the Republicans’ disdain for government altogether. Guess who occupies the real political center? E.J. Dionne Jr. is a Washington Post columnist.