What’s To Debate?
Dems agree on everything
IF you listen to some Democratic activists, and a few of the party’s presidential candidates, party chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz is making a huge mistake by not scheduling more than six primary debates — and the drumbeat to schedule more is only growing louder.
Here’s the thing: Wasserman Schultz is right. The Democrats don’t need any more debates. They simply don’t disagree about much of substance.
The Republicans, meanwhile, disagree quite a lot — as anyone who watched the first two GOP debates knows.
On immigration, their positions ran the gamut from Donald Trump’s wallanddeportation bluster to an open path to citizenship and everything in between. On tax policy, the Republicans displayed a variety of positions on the marginal tax rate, the capitalgains tax and the Fair Tax (or an alternate flattax plan).
Republicans disagreed about raising the federal minimum wage, from favoring an immediate increase to $15 an hour to flatly rejecting any increase to favoring a plan to index the minimum wage to an objective costofliving measure.
The Republicans disagreed vigorously on issues down the line, from the propriety of Kim Davis’ refusal to issue marriage licenses to the proper policy needed (if any) to combat global warming. Even where they agreed on the substance of an issue — as they did on defunding Planned Parenthood — the sparks often flew over the right tactics and policies to pursue to achieve those ends.
The bottom line is that the Republican side of the field features more than a dozen candidates who have very different ideas about what’s best for the country, and very different ideas about the best ways to achieve those goals. The Republican candidates did not merely differ in the style in which they delivered the same pat ideas: Their ideas varied fairly radically from candidate to candidate.
By contrast, the choice on the Democrats’ side boils down, essentially, to which tired, old white person you’d prefer to have carrying forth the banner of a set of virtually identical ideas. All of them will condemn the First Amendment, at least as applied to corporate giving under Citizens United (note: they will all accept corporate money while doing so).
All of them will say that college should magically be free and/or that no one should incur debt paying for it. The differences between their tax and economic policies will consist entirely of disagreements about exactly how much Wall Street and “the rich” should be soaked to pay for government programs that will temporarily redistribute wealth but won’t grow the economy.
On foreign policy, the Democratic candidates are already on record supporting the disastrous Iran deal that’s opposed by an overwhelming majority of Americans. On immigration, they’re all on record supporting an openborders policy and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who are already here. They are all already on record supporting the continuation of taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood in spite of the fact that almost 70 percent of Americans oppose taxpayer funding of abortion.
They’re all, for that matter, completely incurious as to what might actually be on the videos that have shocked the country, showing that Planned Parenthood has for years sold the organs and tissue of aborted children for money.
Jim Webb is the only Democrat candidate who shows the least bit of deviation from Democrat orthodoxy, and he has been rewarded for his intellectual bravery by a standing in the polls that would not qualify him to even be on stage, if this were a Republican debate.
The only plausible explanation for an increased slate of debates is the asyetunrealized hope for all the warmblooded fury of Bidenmania. But even if Joe Biden runs, nothing in his lengthy career in Washington, DC, indicates he’ll be substantively different on the issues from Hillary Clinton in any meaningful way.
The Democrats running for president simply don’t differ on the issues that matter to Americans. Where they do, their differences exist on the margins and consist almost entirely of style, not substance.
If you’re a Democrat and you’re heavily invested in watching a debate between this crowd, you’re simply trying to determine which of the old white people your party has chosen as standardbearers is best suited to repeat the exact same set of talking points.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz is right: The Democrats don’t need more than six debates to make that determination.