Yes, I watched the Democratic presidential debate on CNN this past week, god help me. The best thing I can say about it is that CNN dropped the dramatic WWF candidate intro segment and went straight into the questions. That said, the fact that there were twelve candidates on stage made the event a ridiculous parody of an actual debate. Candidates are given 75 seconds to respond to a question, and 45 seconds for rebuttals. It is simply impossible to grapple with the complex issues facing our nation in any meaningful way within those time constraints. The format drives a kind of Twitter-like approach to discourse, complete with the trolling. Seventy-five seconds is something like 125 words. Try talking a nation out of decades of for-profit healthcare or a century of oil dependence in that little time. It’s a format that greatly favors the status quo.
And the status quo had many defenders last night. As was predicted the previous week by talking heads and broadcast journalists, undoubtedly briefed by opposing campaigns, Elizabeth Warren was targeted repeatedly throughout the proceedings, with the most pointed attacks coming from “Mayor Pete”, Amy Klobuchar, Kamela Harris, and of course, Joe Biden. Buttigieg came after her on single payer health insurance, claiming that she was being disingenuous by not providing her opponents with sound bites of her saying taxes will go up on middle class families. I will say that Warren needs to come up with a better way of talking about the funding mechanism for single payer. She stuck to her position, but it was kind of the same phrases over and over, and though true, they lose their salience on repetition.
The most ridiculous attack came from Kamela Harris, who was trying to get Warren to take a position on compelling Twitter to delete Donald Trump’s account. Mind you, this was in the section of the debate that focused on holding social media and other big tech companies accountable through anti-trust measures, etc. Warren has proposed breaking Facebook up, and I can’t say as I disagree. But somehow Harris thought it might be politically advantageous to reduce this entire conversation to a simple question of whether or not the President should be allowed to tweet like your drunk racist uncle. As if deleting Trump’s Twitter profile would address the antitrust issue … or, really, accomplish anything substantive. Just strange.
Bernie was set up in advance to fail, the media constantly harping on his heart trouble. He put in a very strong performance, I thought, but again … the format is so limiting it just barely makes a difference. Klobuchar, Buttigieg and the half-measure chorus were crowed about by the talking heads, but will this debate move the needle at all? I doubt it. This party’s just getting started.
luv u,
jp
