Who won the Biden-Sanders debate? Our panelists weigh in
on stage talking about totally different realities, talking past one another as if they did not even exist within the same space and time. Here was Bernie Sanders, acknowledging how our flawed and deteriorated health system could enable coronavirus to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans. And here was Biden, convinced he was in Independence Day, saying the coronavirus “is like we’re being attacked from abroad” – although a bunch of people getting sick because the government is too timid to ask people not to go to a goddamn St
Patrick’s Day bar crawl is not exactly an alien invasion. He talked about sending the military in to deal with it, as if it were a foreign country of brown people, with oil reserves.
Once again the moderators may as well not have existed. Jake Tapper, looking weirdly waxy and like his makeup person had dumped a bottle of 1985 Cover Girl foundation on his face and smeared it around a little, couldn’t even be bothered to step in when a squabble arose about whether or not Biden had made statements about cutting social security on the floor of the Senate. He was just sitting there! Couldn’t he have pulled out his phone and gone “to the YouTube”, as Sanders implored, to factcheck that one?
The division between Sanders and Biden is clearer than ever. Sanders wants lasting change, Biden wants to respond to everything as if it were a “crisis” and keep things pretty much the same. But Sanders wasted the opportunity tonight to take his opponent out, and Biden managed to get through an entire conversation without glitching and threatening to punch someone in the face. So a win for him, then.
Jessa Crispin is the host of the Public Intellectual podcast. She is a Guardian US columnist
Art Cullen: ‘The debate was a first step to bringing the Democratic party together’