Debates produce winners and losers. And CNN, known to some as the Clinton News Network, saw to it the biggest winner was the Democratic contenders as a group. Recall that when CNN staged a Republican debate, most of the questions were aimed at getting each candidate to attack the others, producing video clips for later use by Democrats in the general elections and a sense that these quarrelling Republican candidates can’t get along with each other, much less with the Democratic counterparts with whom they would have to work to end gridlock. This time around CNN’s Anderson Cooper directed sensible, often piercing policy questions to the five Democrats, producing some disagreement but rarely a personal attack.
There were some significant losers. It was a bad night for millionaires and billionaires, who Senator Sanders believes control the political and economic systems and will continue to do so unless voters respond to his call to turn out in the millions and upend the existing system. It was a very bad night for Lincoln Chafee, whose appeal for votes is based on his opposition to the Iraq and other wars, and only a tad less bad for Martin O’Malley and Jim Webb, who failed to achieve the Fiorina-style breakthrough they need to become serious challengers to Hillary Clinton. It was also a bad night for President Obama, as all the candidates agreed that the middle class is being destroyed (Sanders dates the beginning to some forty years ago, but says it has been on-going in the past seven years), that the poor are getting poorer, students more heavily indebted, big bankers are still roaming the canyons of Wall Street unburdened by criminal records while marijuana smokers are filling our jails, and that the Middle East is a mess either because of insufficient action on his part (Clinton) or an inability to field an Arab army of the sort that a lowly British Lieutenant was able to rally many years ago.
It was a very good night for Bernie Sanders, whose passion at times exceeds his skill at economic analysis, but whose decency is unquestionable. He does obsess about Wall Street and its power, but he also makes sense when he points out that the $118,5000 cap on wages subject to social security taxes is highly regressive, and can point to substantial legislative successes in improving care for wounded veterans. Whether what he believes is wrong with America is indeed what ails us is open to question as are his solutions to those ailments – are we really in a position to expand government spending by $18 trillion, the Wall Street Journal's estimate of the cost of what he has proposed so far? As are his proposed cures – a health care system modeled on Britain’s struggling government-run, single-payer system that is struggling to meet the demands being made on it.
Sanders, for all his passion and obvious decency, probably will get a positive response to his appeal for more contributions from small donors, and may even have snatched some voters from Clinton: a post-debate focus group of Democratic voters showed that many who were prepared to vote for Clinton before the debate, are switching to Sanders. But it is doubtful that he cut significantly into her base. Indeed, he probably did more to help her than to harm her. His appeal, impassioned as are all of his calls to action, to Republicans and the media to stop harping on Clinton’s e-mail problems met with rousing applause, and a smile and thank-you from his rival, still leading in the polls. Who probably set the standard for obfuscation when she said, “I never took a position on the Keystone Pipeline until I took a position on the Keystone Pipeline.” And when challenged by Anderson Cooper on her flip-flop on the Trans-Pacific Trade agreement (TPP) – she was for it before she was against it – shrugged off the criticism by guessing that every politician on the stage had changed positions on some issues during their careers, although not necessarily during the heat of a campaign.
As for the issues: all candidates want to tax the rich, as each of them defines the rich; all want to see bankers in jail for causing the recent recession; all except Clinton, who thinks students should work at least ten hours per week while in college, favor free tuition at public universities; all want to do more about climate change, with O’Malley pressing for a fossil-fuel free economy and Webb for greater reliance on nuclear power in an “all of the above” energy economy; all want to make the world a kinder place for illegal immigrants, some favoring in-state tuition levels and free health care for these immigrants; all want something done to tighten gun controls, with Sanders warning that the problem is the lack of mental health facilities for potential shooters, and that rural voters will not tolerate the sorts of controls that the others (Webb is an exception) favor.
Which leaves open the important question: will Joe Biden, watching Clinton’s polished, poised, aggressive but not too-aggressive performance, and the audience reaction to her when she played the first-woman-president card, decide that she is unbeatable? Or did he see some weakness, or does he know something we don’t about the next phase of the FBI investigation into her use of her private server? On that latter point, Clinton made probably the truest statement of her career, “I am being as transparent as I know how to be.”
“So for this you gave up the Mets game?” you might ask. Certainly not. It’s on tape. Until then, I am in what Charles Krauthammer calls “the cone of silence” – no one is to dare tell me the score.