I think that Frank Bruni’s take on last night’s Democratic presidential candidates’ debate was pretty much on the nose. From his New York Times column:
In case you were at all confused, Bernie Sanders is the apocalypse. Or something very close to it.
That was the message from his six rivals on Tuesday night at the latest and perhaps nastiest Democratic debate, which devolved at times into an oratorical melee of overlapping voices, overheated tempers and dire warnings about what would happen if Sanders, the current front-runner in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination, becomes the party’s nominee. President Trump would get four more years. Several of the Democrats on the stage in Charleston, S.C., essentially guaranteed it.
And they scared the hell out of me. That’s only partly because I fear that they’re right about Sanders, whose past and even present are gold mines for material that Trump can use to portray him as an ideological fringe figure. It’s also because the candidates did it in an angry, panicked way that, if I were Trump, I’d edit into a campaign commercial and blanket the airwaves. Its tag line would be: “Even Democrats don’t trust Bernie Sanders. Why should you?â€
Nomination contests often get ugly, with candidates in the same party — candidates with some of the same core values — belittling one another. But this felt different. This felt worse. This felt like a genuine freakout.
Ignore Bernie Sanders’s policy views. Discount his dearth of Senate accomplishments or how thin his resume actually is. Does he have the qualities you want to see in a president? I don’t see anything in his temperament or background which would lead me to believe that he can craft a new Democratic coalition for the 21st century. I do think he has the ability to tear the Democratic Party apart and it was on display on the stage in Charleston last night.
Any of the other candidates on stage would have been better.
Actually, what worries me more is not Sanders but his supporters. Do they truly believe that things are this bad? So bad that we need to tear it right down to the ground and start over? I don’t believe they have any notion of just how bad it could get.
“Do they truly believe that things are this bad?â€
Yes. Look at the advisors who surround him. Listen to what they say. Their own words. They are stark raving mad. It’s embarrassing that we are even debating it.
They live in the richest nation that ever has been, one of the freest nations that ever has been, one of the most powerful nations that has ever been, and because it doesn’t match up point-for-point to the utopia they’ve created in their mind what American OUGHT to be, they want to nuke it until it glows and then build their Utopia on the ruins using burnt bodies for mortar. To them the glass ain’t half full; it’s shattered.
God knows America isn’t perfect. There’s a lot of problems with it; rampant homelessness, welfare poverty, hollowing out of production, crony capitalism and rent-seeking, two and three-tiered justice systems, and more. But the house as yet is still structurally sound. To shriek at the rotting siding and loose shingles and sagging steps and cracked window panes and instead of trying to make repairs demand that it be razed to the ground so it can be replaced by a panopticon prison where everyone’s basic needs might be met but everyone spies on and is spied on is f**kin lunacy.
But then too many of them were taught and believe implicitly Howard Zinn’s history how America sux big time. Now being supplemented by the 1619 NYT’s hypothesis that America owes its existence to the slave trade.
“Do they truly believe that things are this bad? So bad that we need to tear it right down to the ground and start over? ”
“They live in the richest nation that ever has been, one of the freest nations that ever has been, one of the most powerful nations that has ever been, and because it doesn’t match up point-for-point to the utopia they’ve created in their mind what American OUGHT to be, they want to nuke it until it glows ”
Make America Great Again sound familiar? Our economy was already pretty good when Trump took it over, yet to hear him and his supporters we had the worst economy ever. The country was falling apart. Now the economy is a bit better for some people, but not everyone. Trump declares everything is wonderful and it is heresy to point out we still have issues.
So what we are seeing is the Democrats supporting Bernie echoing the GOP playbook. Declare that everything is awful and the only chance we have to fix things is tear everything apart.
Steve