In the days after the 2016 election, with the shock of Donald Trump’s victory still fresh, Barack Obama spoke to The New Yorker’s David Remnick about his legacy and the country’s future. One topic of the conversation was the Democratic Party’s bench, or lack thereof. “Obama insisted that there were gifted Democratic politicians out there, but that many were new to the scene,” Remnick wrote. Obama mentioned Kamala Harris, the senator from California, who launched her Presidential candidacy this January with a rush of energy and attention. He mentioned Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, whose own Presidential campaign has surged lately, thanks in part to a well-deployed use of Norwegian. And he mentioned Michael Bennet, the senator from Colorado, who quietly entered the Presidential race last month, and who sits at between zero and one per cent in the polls going into the first Democratic debates this week.
On Tuesday, Bennet walked into a town house on Capitol Hill, removed his blue blazer, and sat down at a glass dining table to talk. He’d just come from a meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee, of which he is a member. Before that, he’d been at debate prep. Bennet will be one of twenty Democrats participating in the first Party-sanctioned primary debates, in Miami. With so many candidates in the race, the Party split the event into two nights, with ten candidates onstage on Wednesday and ten on Thursday. Still, it will be a challenge for Bennet and other candidates to get noticed. “We’re going to be up there for two hours, and probably, if you’re lucky, you’re going to get six or seven minutes,” he said. “This is an exercise in thinking about what you want to say in suboptimal conditions.”
It’s tough to get excited for a ten-person debate. The general atmosphere going into them is one of trepidation alternating with bemusement. The National Institute for Civil Discourse put out a press release on Wednesday that called on the candidates to keep it clean. BuzzFeed published a quiz that challenges readers to name every Democrat in the race. Substantive hashing out of policy and political contrasts isn’t likely to be on offer. But valuable air time is, so the candidates have been practicing. Kirsten Gillibrand let a Times reporter into a mock debate that she held, in which aides played her various rivals. Joe Biden has been huddling with top aides. Cory Booker has been doing pushups. Over the past couple of weeks, Bennet held a few practice sessions, in Washington, in a local middle-school auditorium that his staff had commandeered.
In 2007, writing for The New Yorker about Bennet’s time as the superintendent of the Denver public-school system, Katherine Boo described him as having “a low, gravelly voice that carries without volume and gives a deadpan, cheerful air to his admonitions.” As we talked, he folded and unfolded a red tie, which he’d presumably worn during his Intelligence Committee meeting, on the table before him. There was a lot he wanted to say. Bennet is confident in his ability to hold the attention of living rooms and barbecues in Iowa and New Hampshire. But he is hardly snappy, and he has a tendency to grant himself a senator’s prerogative to make an additional point. “These guys”—he gestured to the aides who had accompanied him to the interview—“will tell you that it’s a weakness of mine,” he said. “I never answer anything in less than a minute, unless it’s a one-word answer, in which case I can get it done in a second.”
On Thursday, when it’s his turn onstage, Bennet will be trying both to introduce himself to voters and to compress his platform into a few words. Bennet’s two big campaign planks—separate, sweeping electoral- and climate-change plans—can be difficult to fit into one-minute answers and thirty-second rebuttals. “Rather than have a long discussion about the Green New Deal,” he told me, “I think what I’m going to be focussed on is, This is my plan. It’s a comprehensive climate plan.” But Bennet’s climate position is complicated. He’s not an outright enemy of the fossil-fuel industry, but his plan is ambitious and has an eye on building a coalition of support—bringing in conservationist and agricultural interests—to increase its chance at passage. I asked him what he’d do if, at the debate, the moderators simply asked people to raise their hands if they support the Green New Deal. “You’re going to have to either raise your hand or not raise your hand,” he said, admitting that it had come up in prep. “And, if you feel strongly enough about it, you’re going to have to find some other opportunity to explain why you did it.”
Bennet’s campaign is premised, in part, on reaching people with a more moderate or modulated message than what much of the rest of the field is offering in 2020. FiveThirtyEight recently pointed out that, like his fellow-candidate Amy Klobuchar, Bennet has a more conservative voting record in the Senate than most of his Democratic colleagues. Part of Bennet and Klobuchar’s trouble is that Joe Biden has so far attracted most of the middle-of-the-road attention. But much of the rest of the field has embraced the idea that the Party has changed, or needs to change, in ways unforeseen when Obama mentioned Bennet three years ago. Harris, the other senator that Obama noted, has adjusted her stance and embraced newly popular ideas like Medicare for All, which Bennet considers to be a “fatal” position for a Democrat in a general election. I asked Bennet who he imagined would be watching on Thursday night, when he’ll be on. “It’s a bigger audience than watch cable at night, traditionally,” he said. “And it’s a bigger audience than are engaging with their politicians on Twitter, probably. So it’s the opportunity to be able to have a first impression with people who don’t spend all their time thinking about politics.”
