The cordial tone of Saturday’s Democratic debate was a vast improvement over increasingly uncivilized Republican bloviating.
Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton were bound to have to address their campaigns’ recent clash over voter data. Sanders apologized for staff who got hold of the Clinton campaign’s voter file, and Clinton responded graciously. Since the DNC has backed off punishing the Sanders campaign by shutting off access to crucial voter information, the issue pretty much went away on Saturday.
One candidate would have preferred more rancor: Martin O’Malley, who had clearly been planning to jump into the rift between the two leading candidates, denounced the “bickering” between the two sides even as no bickering materialized.
O’Malley tried hard all night to step into a hoped-for gap between Hillary and Bernie.
On gun control, his signature issue, he blasted both candidates and touted his record as mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland.
On foreign policy, he mansplained the Middle East to the former Secretary of State. Hillary seemed hard-pressed to suppress an eye-roll.
Bernie Sanders didn’t like O’Malley’s pendantic explanations any better. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s calm down a little bit, Martin,” he grouched as O’Malley went on the attack, accusing both other candidates of flip-flopping.
But there was one area where O’Malley, like Rand Paul in the Republican debate, played an important role. As Clinton and Sanders fought over when the appropriate time might be for the United States to “take out” Bashar al-Assad in Syria, as Sanders put it, O’Malley put in:
“We shouldn't be the ones declaring that Assad must go. Where did it ever say in the Constitution, where is it written that it's the job of the United States of America or its Secretary of State to determine when dictators have to go?”
O’Malley is right. And Sanders, the standard-bearer for progressive values in this race, should do better. He should be carrying the flag for peace and sanity abroad, and an end to the lazy formulations of a country so powerful it takes for granted that it can run roughshod over the rest of the globe.
That’s too bad, because on inequality, the great domestic issue of our time, there is not stronger voice than Sanders.
The best moment of the debate came when Sanders, channeling FDR, welcomed the hatred of big corporations and Wall Street.
The moderator had asked Hillary if, as a Fortune Magazine headline put it, “business loves Hillary.”
“Everybody should,” she shot back—a perfect political answer.
The moderator put the same question to Sanders” “Will corporate America love a President Sanders?”
“No, I think they won’t.” Sanders replied simply.
“So Hillary and I have a difference,” he continued. “The CEOs of large multinationals may like Hillary. They ain’t going to like me and Wall Street is going to like me even less.”
“The greed of Wall Street is destroying this economy,” Sanders added.
Or, as FDR put it in his 1936 campaign speech in Madison Square Garden, “We know now that government by organized money is as dangerous as government by organized mobs.”
Denouncing “business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism,” FDR declared: “They are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred.”
Bernie, in welcoming the hatred of big corporations and Wall Street, is departing dramatically from the modern political script.
In his closing remarks, he invoked his mother, whose dream was to get out of her rent-controlled apartment and own her own house. She died without realizing that dream, Sanders said. America could do better by people like her.
“America is not just for billionaires,” he concluded.
It’s a powerful statement. And it has been, recently entirely taboo.
The rise from humble origins in our supposedly classless society is required boilerplate for presidential candidates. Bill Clinton, the “man from Hope” deployed it to great effect.
Hillary is running in more somber times. She has been forced—in part by Sanders—to acknowledge shrinking opportunity and the yawning gap between rich and poor. In the debate, she joined the other candidates in endorsing debt-free college, raising the minimum wage, and policing Wall Street. On that last point, she is at her least credible, claiming that she would not be influenced by millions of dollars in campaign donations and speaking fees from Goldman Sachs and other investment firms.
The preposterous Washington consensus that you can be loved by Wall Street and, at the same time, serve the interests of ordinary citizens, is crumbling. So is the American myth of a classless society where everyone can get rich and we all play by the same rules.
Fittingly, in her closing remarks, Hillary invoked a Hollywood movie. “May the force be with you,” she said. It was funny, timely, and will poll well. More Americans were watching Star Wars on its opening weekend than tuned into the Democratic debate on the last Saturday night before Christmas.
But it is going to take a lot more actual force, and a lot less glamour and congeniality, to make our national politics serve the interests of ordinary Americans.