The first Democratic debate of the 2020 primary season had been going for about thirty-five minutes when Don from D.C., formerly of Jamaica Estates and Fifth Avenue, registered his opinion in a one-word review on Twitter. “BORING!” As is so often the case, the First Critic, who was tuning in from Air Force One, en route to the G-20 summit in Japan, had got things completely wrong. In this instance, though, his grouse was at least comprehensible.
The opening part of the debate had been interesting in many ways, one of which being how little the President featured in it. By directing the first question at Elizabeth Warren, and making it about whether her extensive suite of policy proposals, including major changes to taxation, health care, and regulation, represented a risk to the economy, Savannah Guthrie, of NBC News, gave the Massachusetts senator a chance to define the terms of the debate. Warren seized the opportunity. She has based her campaign on the theory that Trump is the symptom rather than the cause of America’s malaise. Quickly and clearly, she laid out the argument.
The economy is “doing great for giant drug companies,” Warren said, her voice urgent. “It’s just not doing great for people who are trying to get a prescription filled. . . . It’s doing great for giant oil companies that want to drill everywhere, just not for the rest of us who are watching climate change bear down upon us.” Not mentioning Trump by name, she went on, “When you’ve got an economy that does great for those with money and isn’t doing great for everyone else, that is corruption, pure and simple. We need to call it out. We need to attack it head on. And we need to make structural change in our government, in our economy, and in our country.”
There followed a series of substantive exchanges on issues: the economy, health care, antitrust policy, gun control, dealing with the humanitarian crisis at the southern border, and the war in Afghanistan, where two American troops were killed on Wednesday. In the course of two hours, we heard at some length from all ten candidates on the stage, and at least five of them—Warren, Julián Castro, Cory Booker, Bill de Blasio, and Jay Inslee—probably did themselves some good in the horse race. We also witnessed the first serious one-on-one altercation of the primary campaign, as Castro, the former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Obama, sought to school Beto O’Rourke, his fellow-Texan, on the laws governing the treatment of separated children at the border. (CNN’s Van Jones described this exchange as a “Texas takedown.”)
But it was the progressive agenda outlined by Warren—and also by de Blasio, a vocal presence all night—that dominated the debate, or the first half of it, anyway. After delivering her initial diagnosis of the problem, Warren defended the various remedial measures she has put forward, including dismantling the likes of Facebook and Google, and supporting Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All legislation. “Look at the business model of an insurance company,” she said. “It’s to bring in as many dollars as they can in premiums and to pay out as few dollars as possible for your health care. That leaves families with rising premiums, rising co-pays, and fighting with insurance companies to try to get the health care that their doctors say that they and their children need. Medicare for All solves that problem.”
Several of the candidates on the stage have refused to support Medicare for All, including Amy Klobuchar, the moderate senator from Minnesota; John Delaney, the former Maryland congressman; and O’Rourke. Given the chance to take issue with Warren and the Medicare for All proposal, Klobuchar confined her answer to one sentence: “I am just simply concerned about kicking half of America off of their health insurance in four years, which is exactly what this bill says.” O’Rourke, who has offered his own health-care plan, engaged with the issue at greater length. He and Delaney both said that enrollment in Medicare should be offered to people as an option alongside private insurance, rather than as a replacement.
De Blasio wasn’t having that. Interrupting the Texan, he said, “Congressman O’Rourke, private insurance is not working for tens of millions of Americans. When you talk about the co-pays, the deductibles, the premiums, the out-of-pocket expenses, it’s not working. How can you defend a system that’s not working?” O’Rourke started to respond, but it was Delaney, widely regarded as having no hope in the primaries, who intervened with the strongest argument against embracing Medicare for All. “One hundred million Americans say they like their private health insurance,” he said. “I mean, I think we should be the party that keeps what’s working and fixes what’s broken.”
Whichever side one takes in this debate, its seriousness and importance can’t be doubted. Something similar could be said of the dispute between Castro and O’Rourke on how to resolve the situation at the border, and of the other candidates’ exchanges on a number of other issues, including gun control and tackling climate change. After two and a half years of White House histrionics, administrative incompetence, and policymaking by tweet, it was strangely refreshing to see a group of career politicians, many of whom have spent years studying policy issues, having a serious discussion.
Largely absent were rote attacks on Trump, or a lengthy regurgitation of the debate about whether he should be impeached. It was as if the Democrats had agreed in advance that they wouldn’t spend their precious time in the national spotlight giving their nemesis the attention he so craves, and which he has used to great personal advantage. Of course, they brought up his name when they criticized his policies on immigration, the environment, Iran, and other issues. But they largely avoided personal invective, and their attitude appeared to signal general agreement with Booker, who said, “Donald Trump wants us to fight him on his turf and his terms. We will beat him, I will beat him, by calling this country to a sense of common purpose again.”
To a chronic narcissist like Trump, the fact that he wasn’t the focal point must have made the proceedings virtually unwatchable. After delivering his initial all-caps verdict, he confined himself to one more tweet, in which he taunted NBC News for technical difficulties that delayed the start of the second hour for a few minutes. This snafu was a bit embarrassing for the network, to be sure, but it didn’t detract from the reassuring message of the evening: there is a lot more to Presidential politics than Trump.
