Senator Kamala Harris served up a series of smart lines at the second Democratic Debate, landing the heaviest blows on frontrunner Joe Biden.
Kamala Harris knows how to win a debate. That was one of the few clear takeaways from two rounds of debates featuring twenty Democratic presidential aspirants that Harris herself characterized as a “food fight.” Making her case to the jury watching at home in the second and more contentious debate, the California Senator, a former prosecutor, served up a series of smart lines, landed the heaviest blows on frontrunner Joe Biden, and appeared more poised, prepared, and presidential than anyone else on stage.
When the junior Congressman from California, Eric Swalwell, running on his youth, delivered his zinger to Biden, “Pass the torch!” Biden replied, “I’m holding onto that torch.” Then Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders jumped in shouting down the rest of the unruly field. But Harris silenced everybody: “Guys, guys, people don’t want to hear a food fight, they want to hear how we are going to put food on the table.”
Harris straightened out a slightly stunned-looking Biden after he claimed to have presided over an enlightened immigration policy during the Obama Administration (in contrast to the current fiasco created by Donald Trump). Obama, she noted, deported a record number of non-criminal undocumented immigrants. As attorney general of California, she told sherrifs to disregard ICE orders and stop separating families.
“On this issue I disagreed with my President,” Harris said, subtly undermining Biden’s attempt to cover himself in Obama’s mantle. (He was my President to Harris, the only African American candidate on stage Thursday night, even if he was Biden’s boss—and, she suggested, she had the backbone to stand up to him when he was wrong.)
Harris’s biggest—and best rehearsed—attack on Biden came on the issue of race, which has dogged the Vice President lately. She was personally hurt, she said, by his embracing segregationist Senators and opposing school integration through busing. She described a little girl who was bused to school in California as part of an effort to integrate the schools, “That little girl” she added, “was me.”
Biden never recovered. He sputtered in his answer, looking angry and denying he sided with the segregationists, but defending his opposition to federal integration efforts. “You could go to that school,” he spit at Harris—doing nothing to brush up his reputation for mansplaining, mistreating Anita Hill, or having a tin ear on race, “because it was a local effort.”
Harris took this as an opportunity to school Biden on the ways in which the states don’t always respect civil rights: “That’s why we have the Voting Rights Act.”
Poor Biden. He looked a little shaky, didn’t hear a question, interrupted himself to say he must be out of time instead of finishing an answer. All in all, it wasn’t a great night for him.
Surprisingly, the second debate was a big night for Marianne Williamson, the self-help author who directly addressed Trump in her closer, saying “You have harnessed fear for political purposes and only love can cast that out. . . . . So I, sir, I am going to harness love for political purposes. I will meet you on that field, and, sir, love will win.”
Why not? Williamson appears to be the perfect opponent for our reality TV President—more in tune with the zeitgeist than all those earnest Democrats she derided for spouting so many earnest plans.
Self-help author Marianne Williamson may be the perfect opponent for our reality TV President, with her strategy of love-conquers-all.
And who can argue with that? Senator Kirsten Gillibrand touted her plan to convert our democracy into a purely publicly financed, clean-elections utopia. Great. Why didn’t we think of it before now? Should be a snap.
U.S. Senator Michael Bennet has a decent, self-effacing demeanor that seems entirely out of place in the Hunger Games atmosphere of the crowded debate stage. Shades of Jeb Bush. But he did call out Biden on his claim to have “made” Mitch McConnell increase taxes in what, Bennett clarified, was a “disastrous” piece of legislation that permanently extended the Bush tax cuts.
Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, got off a few good lines, held up under fire for not reforming his police department and preventing the death of yet another African American victim of a police shooting in his hometown, and said, with authority, as the only military veteran on stage that weapons of war have no place in American cities.
Swalwell came into the debate as the only candidate to call for an Australian-style ban and buyback of assault weapons, an inspiringly sensible idea that puts him ahead of the rest of the field.
Asked to pick a single issue that defines them, the candidates gave some revealing answers.
Harris started, disappointingly, by calling for a middle-class tax cut. Gillibrand stuck with clean elections and women’s rights. Biden reminded everyone he worked with Obama, and that he would defeat Trump. Buttigieg said he would fix our democracy. Entrepreneur Andrew Yang promised to give everyone in America $1,000 a month. Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper promised to deal with climate change—but he used his closer, oddly, to bash socialism. Bennet, the other candidate from Colorado, took the opposite tack and said he was for dealing with climate and “what Bernie says about economics” Williamson, weirdly, said she’d call the president of New Zealand and tell her “girl, you are wrong” because America, not New Zealand, is the best place to raise a child; and Bernie Sanders called for a political revolution.
Early in the debate Sanders missed an opportunity to broaden his appeal. Asked whether diversity matters, he gave a quick nod and then immediately pivoted to economics.
Gillibrand, who gave a passionate defense of abortion rights, and Harris, who shut down the moderators when they were trying to get the men to stop bickering over police shootings of black people and spoke, directly and personally, to the issue of race, highlighted that “yeah, yeah” is not an adequate response to the question of representation of women and people of color in the era of Donald Trump.
But Sanders still had the best closer: “I suspect people all over the country who are watching this debate are saying these are good people, they have great ideas. But how come nothing really changes?. . . How come for the last forty-five years, wages have been stagnant for the middle class? How come we have the highest rate of child poverty in the world? How come 45 million people still have student debt? How come three people own more wealth than the bottom half of America?”
“And here is the answer,” Sanders continued, apparently referring to his fellow candidates. “Nothing will change. Unless we have the guts to take on Wall Street, the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the military industrial complex, and the fossil fuel industry. If we don’t have the guts to take them on, we’ll continue to have plans, we’ll continue to have talk, and the rich will get richer, and everybody else will be struggling.”
That pretty much sums it up.
In round one the night before, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and former San Antonio Mayor and Obama Administration official Julián Castro emerged as champions. Warren looked like the frontrunner, confidently spelling out her proposals and dominating the discussion, and Castro shot up a few levels taking a powerful stand on decriminalizing migration while underscoring what’s at stake in a country that has weaponized misogyny, racism, and xenophobia.
One thing is certain: There is no going back to those good old days of comity that Biden invoked in his closer, declaring that no President before Donald Trump had equated racists with decent people. Andrew Jackson, anyone?
It will take more than one election cycle to overcome the structural inequities that have created massive, dangerous cracks in our society. Perhaps it’s a sign of how bad things have become that so many of the candidates are talking about those deeper, scarier problems that we will have to face if we are going to have any chance of a better future.