The New York Times panel rates the winners and losers of last night’s Democratic presidential candidates’ debate (in descending sequence): Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, Tom Steyer. Notice anything about that list? It’s not until you get to the fifth candidate on the list that we encounter someone who actually has a chance of winning and overall the candidates in the bottom five are more likely to win than those in the top five.
What does that tell us?
- Debate performance is irrelevant.
- The NYT panel is completely out of touch.
- The candidates are completely out of touch.
- The members of the NYT panel really don’t like Tulsi Gabbard (the only candidate actually running on a foreign policy platform).
- Each of Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, and Joe Biden have more Washington political experience than all of the other candidates put together
- Nothing
- Other
Offhand I’d say we all lost that debate.
B ?
“The NYT panel is completely out of touch”
Historic first all female moderator panel, criticism is unauthorized.
The current dem debates have become tediously predictable, as each candidate tries to strengthen his/her appeal to the far left base of the Democrat party. The policies emerging, though, are completely alien to most moderate-minded citizens. More troubling is their pie-in-the-sky vagueness as to how this theoretical way of governance would be funded and actually satisfactorily work in the real world.
I also find a sad irony explicit in these Democrat debates – one seemingly bent on hustling American society towards wanting a bigger more commanding central government in place. In essence, what they are touting is a better life is to be had in exchanging freedoms for freebies. In the meantime, playing in the background, are skirmishes going on around the world (Iran, HK, Venezuela, France, even the Netherlands is starting to move right) involving people attempting to regain the freedoms taken away by big government. Just yesterday a news report cited signage, in the most recent confrontation between HK students and China, reading, “Give me liberty or give me death.†Has America simply forgotten so many lessons of our own past revolutions, where self determination and freedom of choice were core principles and goals, rather than creeping dependence on impersonal bureaucratic rule?
I honestly don’t know. I didn’t watch it and most of the analysis I’ve read today seems very Rorschach-y. Not even the soundbites were interesting.
Given the format and the race-horse coverage, I find very little value-added in the debates.
The DNC and the candidates are focused so on the PC, they can’t see the electorate.
What the Democrats need is a different electorate. Oh, wait, they’re trying to import one wholesale! And don’t you dare ask if they’re citizens or not, that’s racist!