Michael Bloomberg Hammered, Elizabeth Warren Shines
Most of the words in the headline aren’t mine. (I added first names, for layout reasons) They’re cut and pasted from the Bloomberg.com news site.
This was the debate I’ve been waiting for. It was largely about winning the primary, as opposed to a Trump bash-a-thon. There will be plenty of time for dealing with lil’ Donnie in the general election.
Billionaire Mike Bloomberg, if you haven’t guessed from the headline, should have stayed home. He had all the charisma of a door stop and his persona spanned the gamut from bland to sneering.
You’d think a guy willing to spend $400 million to get high enough in the polls to be invited to this debate would have spent some money on a debate coach.
Senator Elizabeth Warren was on fire, starting out the evening with a haymaker for the newcomer:
"I'd like to talk about who we're running against," Warren said, "a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians. I'm not talking about Donald Trump. I'm talking about Mayor Bloomberg."
"Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women, and of supporting racist policies like redlining and stop and frisk.”
Warren said she would support whoever becomes the nominee, but added, “Understand this, Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another. This country has worked for the rich for a long time and left everyone else in the dirt. It is time to have a president who will be on the side of working families and be willing to get out there and fight for them. That is why I am in this race and that is why I will beat Donald Trump." Warren came to play.
THIS was the feisty wonk-warrior who’d made her mark in Washington over the past decade:
Later in the debate, Warren grilled Bloomberg on his refusal to release women who have worked for him from nondisclosure agreements, showing off her questioning skills honed on the Senate floor. She got Bloomberg to say that “none of [the women] accuse me of doing anything other than maybe they didn’t like a joke I told” — which is practically admitting that he created a hostile workplace for women on national television.
Those weren’t Warren’s only standout moments. She had characteristically strong policy answers, strong hits on other candidates, and even a reasonably compelling defense of the other woman onstage (Amy Klobuchar) in a way that bolstered her feminist positioning. She owned the night — a vital first step toward making her campaign top-tier again.
One other thing I and Kos at Daily Kos noticed was Warren's subtle concession of the left lane to Senator Bernie Sanders.
Of major consequence, Warren eagerly embraced the “capitalist” label with gusto. She’s ceded the left-left to Bernie Sanders. By creating distance from him, she presented herself as a viable option not just for former Warren supporters who have defected to Sanders, but also for supporters of the other candidates potentially looking for a new home.
https://twitter.com/markos/status/1230370369959153664?s=20
I know that I’m starting to sound like a conspiracy crank on this topic, but you’d think between Politico, the New York Times, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, and the Washington Post, one of them could have slipped Warren’s name into the headline of their main story on the debate.
Let’s move on and take a look at how other candidates fared.
The other newsworthy conflict of the night was between Senator Amy Klobuchar and Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Their quest for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party’s center turned personal.
Here’s Henry Gomez at Buzzfeed News:
“Are you — are you trying to say that I'm dumb?” Klobuchar wondered aloud as she interrupted a slashing attack from Buttigieg, who was refusing to let slide the Minnesota senator’s recent inability to identify the president of Mexico. “Or are you mocking me here, Pete?”
Klobuchar then emphasized her electoral success, presenting herself as a “proven winner” who could take on President Donald Trump and contrasting herself with Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who lost badly in his only bid for statewide office.
“If winning a race for Senate in Minnesota translated directly to becoming president,” Buttigieg shot back, “I would have grown up under the presidency of Walter Mondale.”
And Elena Schneider at Politico:
Politically, Buttigieg and Klobuchar are both hawking middle-of-the-road, tell-it-like-it-is personas, which they argue Democrats need to carry the Midwest, the region they call home. They are both competing to emerge as the main moderate alternative to Bernie Sanders, the current polling frontrunner.
But the rivalry runs deeper than their political positioning. Klobuchar has regularly spoken about sexism on the campaign trail, explaining that she is willing to call out “double standards” for female candidates because “we have to grapple with the fact that some people think a woman can’t win” against Trump, she told POLITICO in January. And this fall, Klobuchar said that a woman with the former mayor of South Bend’s resume and qualifications would likely not be on the presidential debate stage or get treated as a serious national candidate.
Jessica Sutherland at Daily Kos wasn’t impressed with Buttigieg, either:
Pete Buttigieg’s performance was also noteworthy. The mayor may be able to read Norwegian but he can’t seem to read a room. Buttigieg’s constant attacks on Amy Klobuchar made him look like a mansplaining bully.
“Mayo Pete” has been gliding through this election but I wouldn’t be surprised if more people start to find his patronizing demeanour a little hard to stomach.
Former Vice President Joe Biden had a solid night. He needed more than that.
The Shane Goldmacher and Reid J. Epstein analysis at the New York Times was spot on:
It was not so long ago that Mr. Biden was widely assumed to be the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Wednesday’s debate showed that no one else in the race thinks that’s the case now.
Standing in the center of the stage, Mr. Biden spent the night watching everyone else challenging and criticizing one another while avoiding much mention of him. Only a couple of spare remarks from Ms. Warren addressed Mr. Biden’s political record. Everyone else clearly thought their time was better spent going after the others.
It marks quite the comedown for Mr. Biden, the race’s polling leader for the better part of the last year. But after finishing fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire — two early-state disasters — Mr. Biden is on the ropes. He’s struggling to raise money, his super PAC is gasping for air and Mr. Bloomberg is spending heavily to try to fill the center-left vacuum.
While a significant amount of observers thought Warren’s debate performance was impressive, Senator Bernie Sanders was also a winner.
Nothing was said to or about him that will change his growing front-runner status.
The sharpest attack of the evening on Sanders came from Mike Bloomberg, who suggested the policies being talked about on stage were tantamount to communism. While all the right wing media are celebrating that moment today, they’re ignoring Sanders’ response, via Mediaite:
Sanders billed Bloomberg’s remark as a “cheap shot.”
“Let’s talk about Democratic Socialism. Not communism, Mr. Bloomberg. That’s a cheap shot. Let’s talk about what goes on in countries like Denmark, where Pete correctly pointed out; they have a much higher quality of life …We have socialism for the very rich. Rugged individualism for the poor,” Sanders stated, ripping into Bloomberg.
The senator from Vermont then concluded, “I believe in Democratic Socialism for working people. Not billionaires. Health care for all. Educational opportunity for all.”
By staying on message, Sanders walked away from the night with his position as front-runner unchallenged.
Here’s Eric Levotz from the New York Intelligencer:
The Vermont senator turned in a “yeah, good, okay” caliber showing. He’s had more dominant performances. And, for perhaps the first time this cycle, he was only the second-best billionaire-basher on the debate stage.
But when you’re up by eight runs, a walk’s almost as good as a home run. Sanders took his usual ration of hits. His rivals slapped his wrists, yet again, for being too forthright in his ideological self-description, and not forthright enough in the details of his health-care plan. But he was spared the beatdown that traditionally awaits new (or at least, newly undisputed) front-runners as a matter of course:
With the arguable exception of Pete Buttigieg (and/or the ineffectual exception of Michael Bloomberg), no one made taking down the man who presently leads the field by double-digits their top priority.
***
Debate Trivia
https://twitter.com/billritter7/status/1230343297677262855?s=20
In terms of fundraising, Elizabeth Warren’s $2.8 million haul for the evening was just a tad better than Bernie Sanders’ $2.7 million.
Lots of people tuned in….Via the Global (PR) NewsWire:
Viewership analysis by Samba TV, the leading provider of global TV data and audience analytics, finds that 10.2 million US households viewed the Nevada Democratic presidential debate on February 19. This represents a 126% increase from the previous New Hampshire debate. This was the largest debate audience so far in 2020.
This immediate analysis is derived from the Samba TV panel of 3.4 million US households and represents the most accurate measurement of actual viewing habits of US households across both linear television and OTT viewing.
Via press release from NBC News: (Total viewers vs households mentioned above)
NBC News and MSNBC once again made television history with the most-watched Democratic debate ever, averaging nearly 20 million total viewers across the two networks, according to Nielsen Fast National Data.
Last night’s debate was also the top-rated Democratic debate ever in the key A25-54 demo and attracted 13.5 million live stream viewers, surpassing any previously hosted debate this election cycle. NBC News and MSNBC now claim the top two Democratic debates and top three Democratic debate nights.
If all else fails, just lie about your debate performance, as predicted by Elizabeth Warren.
“Understand this: After his performance tonight, I have no doubt he is about to drop ― tonight ― another $100 million in this campaign,” she said during a post-debate interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews.
“Why does this performance lead to more spending?” Matthews asked.
“Oh, come on!” she shot back. “In order to try to erase America’s memory of what happened on that debate stage.”
https://twitter.com/RawStory/status/1230539970584154114?s=20
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