The lead story line of tonight’s debate is the way it highlighted the left versus centrist candidates. That’s a fight the party needs to have, and there were several bracing moments, notably the face-offs between Elizabeth Warren and the improbably oft-questioned John Delaney.
But I was watching for something else, too. Every poll shows that what voters care about is electability. Who can beat Donald Trump? I would have thought therefore that one of these people would have attempted to use tonight to scream: “Me. Look at me. I’m the electable one, and here’s why.” But none of them did.
They all took a stab at it here and there, and some of them had pretty good lines. But nobody said anything memorable. If you think about lines from this debate that people might remember three months from now, there was only one—Warren’s riposte to Delaney that “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.”
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But nobody said a single memorable thing about Trump! Not one. Here we’re coming off a two-week period when he’s been more openly racist than ever before. He’s tearing the country to pieces. Those poor kids are still in cages (which was mentioned by someone, or maybe two someones, but just in a way that kind of ticked the box).
We’re seeing now, in this last week or 10 days, for the first time during his presidency, stories in newspapers about some of his core voters beginning to peel away from him. His poll numbers are down among white working-class women. More generally, suburban women of all classes are souring on him.
Monday, he made a joke about a platform collapsing to 9/11 survivors and first responders. Tuesday morning, he made certifiable comments about the African-American community calling the White House to tell him how much they love him. His raging inappropriateness to the office has been on display lately on an hourly basis.
None of that came up. Why did I not hear Elijah Cummings’ name? They don’t want to fall into Trump’s trap of making Democrats synonymous with the Squad, right? Well, here was a pretty good chance to make the debate not Trump vs. the Squad but Trump vs. the universally respected Cummings. No one took it.
Don’t get me wrong. Warren was really good. Bernie Sanders was much better than his unmemorable performance in the first debate. Pete Buttigieg said some very smart things. Amy Klobuchar and Beto O’Rourke had some moments, O’Rourke certainly improved over his shambolic first trip. Steve Bullock was good on a few things, though weak on others. Of the centrists, Tim Ryan was probably the best. And yes, Marianne Williamson had a couple for-real good moments, on race in particular.
But nobody really found an imaginative way to do what I think was job No. 1 tonight: say I’m the one to go beat Trump. I have this guy’s number. I guess a lot of you will say that’s not what tonight was about, or that’s not what the questions were about. But in response I’d say this.
It’s quite obvious that Democratic voters want to know who has the right stuff to beat Trump. They want to know that a lot more than they want to know whether somebody supports Medicare for everybody or Medicare for those over 50. As for the format and the questions, a great politician knows how to turn a question around and answer it however he or she wants to answer it. But nobody had the imagination (fault their staffs, too) to realize that the moment was perfect for an imperishable line about Trump’s unfitness for office. Such a line, or a short soliloquy even, would have made its speaker stand out and communicated to the TV audience that that person saw the big picture, saw the stakes.
I’m not saying that none of the people on the stage this night is electable. I actually think that if the ball bounces the right way, at least seven of them could beat Trump. I’m just saying that it’s disappointing and slightly worrisome to me that there was an opening here just sitting and waiting for them that none of them took. Somebody had a chance to emerge from this a real star, and no one did. It’s early, and maybe it’s not a big deal. But this is the big leagues. I’d like to see big league-level play, especially with the stakes as enormous as they are.
