Not much has changed since the December debate. The Iran crisis dissipated quickly because Trump got cold feet about following up on the assassination of an Iranian general and the Iranians gave him no excuse to take further action. The impeachment process continues, very slowly, and will fizzle out unless Mitch is somehow convinced to have witnesses even though all that they can say is that Trump did indeed hold up aid to Ukraine, which is what the Republicans have always been willing to accept. The polls have remained remarkably steady: Biden is ahead in national polls, and tied or close to tied in New Hampshire and Iowa. Bernie is steady at about twenty percent, but not moving up. So it is time for people to vote. They know what the Democratic candidates stand for and are familiar with their personalities. And voting is, in fact, three weeks away.
So what would the candidates choose to talk about last night? One guess was the recent flapdoodle over what Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren said to one another a while ago when she was thinking about running for President and, according to her, he said that a woman couldn’t get elected, an observation that she now reveals because it will discredit him with female voters. This is a low blow, however, because ruminations about what might make a candidate viable is not limited to candidates. I remember political commentators, including myself, saying in 2007 and early 2008 that Obama was not likely to get the Democratic nomination in 2008 because he was African-American. I was wrong. So there was nothing wrong in Bernie telling Elizabeth that her chances were slim. Remember that commentators expected that female voters would turn out in droves to vote for Hillary to become the first woman President, and then they didn’t. Maybe there is an anti-feminist strand in the woman vote that would also effect Warren’s prospects. And now that comes back to bite Sanders.
Now here is what really happened last night. The moderators did indeed raise what they considered the alleged insult to Warren and then disregarded Sanders denial, as if it must have happened because she claimed it happened. Shades of #metoo, where all men are considered guilty if charged. The two, Bernie and Elizabeth, quickly moved off that topic. It is too rife with emotion. Before that marquee interchange, the candidates had been busy with pronouncing their set positions on a variety of issues, being sure to include the stock phrases that would distinguish each of them from the other candidates, although many of them fell back on the platitudes that are associated with political rhetoric, such as “bonafide foreign policy credentials” and “non-interventionism in these troubled times”, however untroubled are these times as compared to all the decades that have preceded it going back to the time right after the Spanish American War, which is more than a century ago.
So Sanders says that he would negotiate rather than fight, and everyone can agree with that, but I am not sure how many people would rely, as he would, on a revivified United Nations to solve the world’s problems. Biden, addressing his weakness in that he voted for the war in Iraq, runs out his now oft repeated justification for the vote, saying he had trusted that the Bush Administration would use the vote only as leverage to introduce atomic inspectors into Iraq and that he had led the Obama Administration’s efforts to remove troops from Iraq. Biden also says that Congress just doesn’t want to take on its responsibility to take a vote on an impending war. Klobuchar says that she was against the Iraq War and wants the Senate to invoke the War Powers Resolution so as to keep Trump out of Iran. Warren applies her general charge of corruption in contemporary politics to her views on foreign policy, saying that she wants to limit the revolving door that allows defense officials to become lobbyists and visa-versa. Better to use diplomacy and cyber-warfare-- though not really grappling with the fact that all out cyber-warfare might well be very damaging to all participants, perhaps not as damaging as a nuclear exchange, but very damaging nonetheless. Steyer says that he has good judgment and that he has negotiated with foreign governments and international corporations as a businessman, which is not much of a credential in comparison with even having had a seat on the Foreign Intelligence Committee of either the House or the Senate, where you have been exposed to what is going on behind the scenes and can so get your bearings on what might arise if you made it to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The candidates are also clear about how they oppose one another on trade negotiations. Sanders says he is the only candidate against the new Canada, Mexico, United States trade deal for his usual leftish reason that it and other trade agreements do not sufficiently safeguard American workers against foreign competition, while Warren denounces trade negotiations for her usual reasons, which are that they are an exercise in corruption by the corporations. Biden does go deeper when he says that the United States needs to combine with the European Union to set world wide trade policy because otherwise China will dominate the world stage on trade. He turns away from the strictly moral and righteous argument to talk about the realities of the present world system.
What the differences in the candidates positions on policy shows is that they don’t disagree all that much. Any of the candidates would be in the Democratic Party tradition of big government and expanded human rights. They all want health coverage for all; they all think corporations have too much sway over government; they all think a woman could be President. So they all make the case for the Democratic Party and against the Republican Party, whomever it might nominate, and particularly against Trump, because the Republican Party is on the other side of all these issues. Voters can take comfort in that all the Democrtic candidates are reliable Liberals, even if some are of a more moderate stripe. They would all pursue the New Deal agenda of expanding rights and benefits. The voter knows what he or she is getting by voting Democratic next Fall.
Now that everyone had gotten the policy issues out of their systems, they could try to make an impression on the viewing audience that goes beyond position taking on issues, the nuances of which are difficult to follow if you are not a policy wonk. Moreover, those policy issues are also, and most damagingly, boring, because they require voters to concentrate very hard to figure out how the candidates differ from one another in a way that might appeal to some particular voter. Klobuchar tries to go beyond politics by invoking personal biography that voters might find appealing. She mentioned last night that her father had been married three times and so that did not leave much money to use when it was time for him to go into an assisted living facility. The humor Amy brought to this revelation made her seem just an ordinary human being rather than a stuffed shirt or a victim of her circumstances, which is the ploy Kamala Harris had brought to her moment of self-revelation with regard to Joe Biden in that debate many months ago when she remarked on the fact that she had been bussed, as if that proved that bussing was a good social policy. Warren does a similar thing, personalizing politics, when she refers to her brothers serving in the military and she herself having had two young kids when she started teaching in law school. Humanizing is good, though Klobuchar gets criticized for that because, unlike Warren, she is not already well known for her policy positions, and so cannot afford to be typecast as an earnest, hardworking, but hardly innovative politician.
Warren, for her part, does have fresh ideas, even if I think that most of them, like the wealth tax, are bad ideas. She did introduce last night the idea that the government should contract for the manufacture of generic drugs, as it does for so many other things, so as to introduce some competition into the pharmaceutical industry, which is itself reluctant to manufacture generics because they do not yield high profit margins. An interesting idea worth further consideration and well within the realm of a New Deal agenda which prized itself on goosing corporations into doing the right thing. Then again, she wants to subsidize child care, which would be very, very expensive and come at the cost of other worthwhile programs that do not monetize the family, such a policy a tremendous revolution in both economics and social structure. Sure, mothers aren’t paid for their work and maybe they should be, but I don’t know how to get there from here. That is an issue for a few generations down the pike, after we have rebuilt American infra-structure, got everybody a living wage, as well as access to as much education as they can handle, and extended health care to all who want it. Issues stack up but you can’t skip over the higher priority ones to the deeper ones. History doesn’t work that way.
Actually, one moderator did ask a question about the nature of social policy, though it wasn’t to ask Elizabeth Warren about how she prioritized issues. It was asked of Pete Buttigieg. How come he wanted millionaires to have to pay their own college costs when millionaires can send their children to public school or have them make use of the public library? I don’t think Mayor Pete had considered that question. He gave the obvious but off point answer that higher education was voluntarys for all-- but so is the use of the public library. Considering the underlying import of the question would mean recalling that the New Deal was interested in entitlements for all so that everybody got Social Security while Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty had emphasized economic qualifications for welfare eligibility or subsidized apartments. (Medicare was for all old people, perhaps because, at the time, the elderly were by and large poor, though this policy might just have been a throwback to the New Deal).
Such arcane matters will not trouble voters even if one perception rather than another of what is the right look for a social policy does get absorbed by the public: whether it is better to give money to those who need it or to establish a right which may carry money with it. What is more important, at the moment, is how the candidates get over to the public as individuals rather than as policy makers, even Warren supporters thinking her ideas less important than the fact that she will try to be as bold as possible should she get to the White House. On that score, Buttigieg, Warren, Sanders and Klobuchar have got down their rhetorical rhythms. You know what each of them sound like. That is bad for Biden, who is fine in terms of substance, but lacks rhetorical polish or style. He uses “Let’s get real” too much and so it is a time filler rather than a way of providing emphasis. And remember, should Biden get the nomination, he will be facing off against Trump, who has his own rhythms down pat, however horrendous most people I know think is the substance of his rhetoric.