Democrats, Debating

First Day

I did my duty and watched the Democrats’ “debate” on June 26. It was chaos. Two hours of ten candidates, each interrupting the others to delivering rehearsed lines to elicit cheers from the friendly audience. All the while, I’m thinking, “Is it going to be one of these? Please, no.”

Look, I admit that Donald Trump was a ridiculous candidate, unqualified to be president of the United States, and that Barack Obama, two years out of the Illinois legislature, was not fully qualified either. But does that mean qualifications are off the table? Would the Democratic Party really nominate a 44-year-old former secretary of HUD? Or a 46-year-old former member of the House of Representatives who ran for Senate and lost? Three of the candidates in the debate were current House members, but America has not elected a congressman president since the 19th century.

We do occasionally elect senators, and I knew of Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. The debate began with Warren declaring that America was a great country for the oil companies, the drug companies, and the insurance companies, but that the game was rigged against the rest of us. The badness of life in America was a common theme. “The economy is not working for the average American,” Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey boomed. “There’s plenty of money in this country,” said New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio, whose city includes Wall Street. “It’s just in the wrong hands.”

Really? Is that the reason to reject Donald Trump — that life here is fundamentally unfair? Didn’t life offer about the same measure of fairness under Barack Obama? Has Trump transformed America that much in two and a half years? Apparently so; the debate among Democrats has shifted hugely left, and is now revolving around “social justice.” I use the term in quotation marks — but then, I’m not a Democrat.

Of the ten politicians on the first day, the most articulate, zealous, and dangerous was Elizabeth Warren. When the moderator asked, “Who among you would abolish private health insurance,” her hand shot up immediately, and it was the only one. Warren had no hesitation on any subject except for guns, which she uncharacteristically said needed to be “researched” and was “not an across-the-board problem.” For her, everything else was an across-the-board problem. She knew the solutions she wanted and promised to bite down like a pit bull in order to get them.

The closest to Warren that first night was Booker. When it came to “health care for all,” Booker was positively pushy. If Congress wasn’t ready to act when he took office, he said, “I’m not going to wait.” I waited for somebody to ask, “And do what?” but nobody did.

I noted that when the subject came to war, Bill DeBlasio objected that America has “gone to war without Congressional authorization.” I liked that he referred to the Constitution — hardly anyone did — though I recall Barack Obama saying something similar. When politicians get power they like to use it.

The contestants did the usual dodging of questions. The champion evader was the former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke, who was asked whether he favored a 70% top rate of income tax. He switched to Spanish, and when he returned to English, he had changed the subject. He dodged a question from the former HUD secretary, Julian Castro, who tried to get him on the record about Title 1325 of the US Code. I didn’t know what that was, and I don’t think O’Rourke did, either. When O’Rourke was pitched a question about climate change, he dodged it by talking about his visit to Pacific Junction, Iowa, which had had a flood. O’Rourke was the “I-feel-your-pain” candidate. Some of the others tried it, but he was the master of it. He irritated me more than any of them.

Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who has been cheered by libertarians for her stance against war, was calm and controlled. Not that this is an asset; “fire in the belly” is what wins elections, and she didn’t have much. Maybe it was her military training. Still, when Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio was cornered into saying that America has “to stay engaged” in Afghanistan, Gabbard replied, “We have to bring our troops home.” That was good.

Governor Jay Inslee of Washington, the climate-change man, bragged about the Evergreen State’s wind turbines and its progress toward “clean” electricity. Washington is my home state, so his bragging doesn’t impress me. Because of our mountains and rivers, we have been able to produce 70% of our electricity from dams, but most of them were in place before Inslee was born, and not one has been built since he was elected. Wind turbines produce 6% of our electricity, but they are federally subsidized and require the dams to ramp up when the wind dies down. Washington does have a strong economy as Inslee said, but it had that before he was elected.

At one point a moderator asked Inslee if his “plan” could save Miami from being flooded by the rising seas. He began a long-winded answer, checked himself and said, “Yes.” It was the most ridiculous promise of the night: Jay Inslee, the man who would hold back the sea.

Not all the comments among the no-hopers were as goofy as his. After Elizabeth Warren had come out for abolishing private health insurance, Representative John Delaney of Maryland allowed that many people like their private health insurance. “Why,” he asked, “should we be the party of taking things away from people?” Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota made the same point. It was a reasonable one; there is no way any of them, if elected, would be able to do away with private health insurance. It was a night, however, when reasonableness was in short supply and offered mainly by candidates who weren’t going to win.

Second Day

More of the same. I tuned in just as Joe Biden was bloviating about Donald Trump’s “tax cut for the wealthy,” which was followed by Senator Kamala Harris of California going on about the “tax bill that benefited the 1%.” “No,” I thought, “not two hours of this.”

A few minutes later the moderator asked Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont if it wouldn’t be politically wiser to define the Democratic Party as nonsocialist. Sanders dodged the question and declared that Trump is “a pathetic liar and a racist.” Sanders was the only candidate to name Wall Street as the enemy. Regarding the health insurers, he said, elect him and “their day is done.”

Sanders promised to cut prescription drug prices in half. This was the outrageous promise of Day Two, though it doesn’t quite match Jay Inslee’s promise to hold back the seas.

Kamala Harris, California’s former chief prosecutor, promised to fight. On immigration, she said that if Congress didn’t offer her a bill granting residence to illegal immigrants who came in as children, and their parents who came in as adults, she would declare it by executive order. Harris also said she would “ban by executive order the importation of assault weapons.”

The other candidate promising executive orders was Sanders, who said he would reverse by executive order every one of Trump’s executive orders.

Later in the debate the moderators asked for a yes-no reply on the question of whether noncitizens who had no papers allowing them to be in the United States should be deported. It was stated that under Barack Obama, three million such people were deported. Not one of the candidates said they supported this. All of them were for letting everyone who made it over the wall stay here, and for giving them free medical care and all the other goods and services to which every American had a “right.”

Harris, whose ancestry is part African, played the race card on white Joe Biden, saying, “I do not believe you are racist,” and then accused him of excusing racism. Clearly this was a prepared missile launched at the principal enemy. Part of it was that Biden had opposed mandatory racial busing sometime in the distant past — opposition to busing apparently being an indisputable mark of Cain. Biden didn’t defend his opposition to busing as such; his reply was that he had favored busing imposed by local authorities but not by the Department of Education.

As the frontrunner — and a guy with a long political record — Joe Biden made a fat target. Sanders lit into him for voting for the Iraq War (which Hillary Clinton had done as well). But that vote was in 2002, 17 years ago, when the Woke Generation was still in Pampers. Biden didn’t bother to defend it, but said, “I don’t think we should have combat troops in Afghanistan.”

Trump said that, too, as I recall.

Among the no-hopers, John Hickenlooper, the former governor of Colorado, said the Democratic Party should not label itself socialist, and that it just wouldn’t work to be “guaranteeing everybody a government job.” I liked that, but nobody cared what John Hickenlooper said. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York was for taxpayer-funded election campaigns, which would save the nation by “getting money out of politics.” Representative Eric Swalwell of California advocated a federal buyback of assault guns, whether you wanted to sell yours or not. Andrew Yang, the Pie in the Sky candidate, wanted to give every American $1,000 a month, which he said would make people so physically and mentally healthy that it would increase Gross Domestic Product by $700 billion a year. (He really did say this!) And then there was Marianne Williamson, an author of some self-help books that I’d never heard of, but which made the New York Times bestseller list. She wanted to “harness love” to beat Donald Trump in November 2020.

Finally, Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado. He also said some things, but I can’t find anything in my notes that makes actual sense.

The one candidate I was eager to hear was Pete Buttigieg. I admit to a certain prejudice against the man, not because he is gay but because the idea of elevating a 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, to the office of president of the United States strikes me as a jump too far. South Bend is not much bigger than Yakima, Washington, and for the presidency, age 37 is barely legal. But what the hell . . . Buttigieg did say more sensible things than any of the rest of them.

My first note on Buttigieg was that his version of “Medicare for All” was not forcing everyone to have government insurance — the Sanders-Warren idea — but allowing people without private insurance to buy into a Medicare-like plan. Buttigieg said, “Even in countries that have full socialized medicine like England, they still have a private sector.”

On guns, Buttigieg said he was for universal background checks. That’s all. Noting that he was the only candidate on stage who had trained in military weapons — he served in Afghanistan — he said, “There are weapons that have absolutely no place on America’s streets.” He didn’t say which ones, but it was a reasonable statement.

On the topic of China, Buttigieg, who is from a part of the country not too favorable to world trade, made it clear he did not favor a trade war. “Tariffs are taxes,” he said. His answer to the economic challenge of China was to “invest in our own competitiveness.” I agreed with that, too, though a warning flag goes up when I hear a politician say “invest.”

Still, if I had to vote Democrat, I’d vote for Buttigieg — if I had to vote Democrat.