I’d like to not care about the superficial stuff… but this will be a person who has to win an election. We would not be doing our duty as citizens if we did not factor electability into our thinking.
As a conservative, If I had to vote in the Dem Primary today, it would either be with Yang or Booker. Booker’s less divisive nature appeals to me.
Well, that’s you, but TV is a visual medium and other people may say they are only interested in policy, but their deeper brain is responding to different inputs. Just re-read all of “Pete presents himself well” posts above.
For me, I have said before and will say it again, this long drawn out campaign process before we even get to a primary only serves to let everyone move through initial curiosity and interest in policy and begin to start nit-picking all of the candidates. Ultimately we end up disliking everyone just a bit.
You are not wrong here. Thankfully the November debate requires 3% in polls. Which may clear out everyone but 5 or 6 folks.
Then we can get to hating on those 5 or 6 and pining for Booker and O’Rourke and Klobuchar ;).
I would rather no % cutoff and no debate, we’ve seen enough, and get to the primaries and let the voters do the culling.
“Whiny” was the word that I used to describe Warren’s voice last night. I don’t think I’ve heard her use quite that tone before.
538 did some post-debate polling, which might give us an idea of how non-Dopers think the candidates did last night.
I don’t think we really HAVE seen enough.
Or at least, we’ve seen too much of the wrong stuff, because we’ve had too many vanity candidates up on stage.
But it’s hard to have a really good debate, and nearly impossible to have one between the actual contenders, and it’s hard to cover many topics, when the time has to be split up ten or twelve ways.
There shouldn’t have been a dozen candidates in this debate. Everyone’s already had a fair chance of building a following. Those that haven’t been able to do so: gather up your jackets, head for the exits, you obviously haven’t found many friends.
Time to narrow this down to no more than half a dozen, and keep narrowing after that. Unless someone makes a big move in the polls between now and the week before Debate #6, I’d be happy with that being just Biden, Warren, and Sanders.
I was reminded of the Witchsmeller Pursuivant from the first Blackadder series, maneuvering the questioning into something that would produce an answer which he could triumphantly proclaim to be a “CONFESSSION!!”.
I agree that Warren’s strategy of not saying “tax increase” is wearing thin. It might be helpful for her to devise a thirty-second explanation that doesn’t contain an easy “taxes will rise” soundbite but gets the idea across. Something like this, except with the correct numbers:
If folks press her on, “Aha! You’re saying that you’d almost double the taxes on that family!” she can respond with, “It’s important to look at the family’s financial situation. Again, their actual take-home pay increases under this proposal.”
Once you have the correct number, you could brand it: the $3,000 health care dividend, or some such. Make it a talking point, and be ready to pull it out every time a Republican accurately but misleadingly harps on the tax increase.
Yes, I got the distinct impression that Warren was trying very hard to avoid giving the Republicans a soundbite of her saying ‘I’m going to raise your taxes’. The avoidance may not go over well in the primaries, but if she’s nevertheless the nominee, the soundbite would have gone over even worse in the general. And we need to win this thing; although I usually like it on the rare cases when moderators try to insist that candidates actually answer the question, it really made me wince that the moderators were trying to give the Republicans that soundbite.
I agree that it would help if she can come up with a better way to say it. "Costs’ may be more accurate, but it doesn’t – or at least the way she was putting it doesn’t – give much of a soundbite in the other direction.
– I listened to most of the debate on NPR radio, but missed the ending. I was getting too worn down; and the format made it next to impossible for anyone to answer anything properly, as none of them ever got enough time. With that many candidates I suppose they couldn’t give any of them significant time on any answer, but trying to squash everything into almost no time doesn’t give us much information, either. (Yes, I know I was just complaining that Warren couldn’t come up with a soundbite. I wish they didn’t matter, but they do.)
I would love to see Bernie drop out because it was because of him and his bros screaming ‘rigged!!!’ that forced the DNC to bend over backwards to allow everyone into the debates and not have a kiddie table.
I have NO proof, but I seriously suspect that Gabbard and Steyer met the donor threshold by Republican rat fuckers who tossed a couple of dollars to them to make sure they could keep the debate field as big as possible.
That, and folks spreading their money around among the Junior Varsity candidates keeps them above the threshold (rather than concentrating their donation on one candidate). I suppose each of them has *some *true supporters, but I do think there is a lot of nonsense propping them up.
What are some of the top answers you would have preferred to hear?
Biden in the opener - “I do think that NOW after the outrageous corruption that has been Trump we need to set a bar that eliminates even any potential appearance of benefit by association. That said, I am VERY proud of my role in the Obama administration implementing our government’s, and the international community’s, vision of decreasing corruption in Ukraine’s government. That is the sort of extensive experience I will bring to the job of president. The experience of implementing change that benefits our country and our world rather than Trump’s extorting a corruption of our nation’s election process by foreign entities.”
Warren - “Yup, there will be taxes, mostly paid by the wealthiest but not only. AND taxpayers below family income X will have* more in their pockets to spend* on other things because they will save more from no more premiums and co-pays than they will pay in taxes.”
Biden near the close - “I believe that anyone on this stage could beat Trump. He’s a clown. But damn. I thought Hillary would. I think we best go with the candidate who can be most assured of beating him, and beating him, or whoever else the GOP nominates once he is impeached and convicted, badly, the one who can bring a Senate majority on that win’s coattails, even as foreign powers try to interfere on his behalf. I believe I am that candidate.” (No snark.)
ShadowFacts, yes, subjective opinions vary. I was hoping to see her handle herself well. To my eye she did not. NO QUESTION that some others disagree. But I had moved over to believing her electability story and after last night I am questioning it again. I may not be representative of swingable primary voters. Or might be. The next two weeks will show. What was your subjective opinion?
Count me as another puzzled by why Harris evidently thought this attack was a big winner.
Trump’s Twitter feed is consistently awful, but he does steer clear of overtly breaking Twitter rules. Banning him would take a re-writing of the rules.
Yes, the stuff Trump insinuates does encourage horrific acts by his followers. But, again, he’s not overtly breaking the rules.
Harris seemed to be advocating treating people who don’t break rules differently based on their political views. That’s GOP stuff, not Democratic Party stuff. And why did she think that Warren’s failure to sign on to this cause would be damning for Warren?
As always, the disclaimer: if Harris is the candidate, I will vote for her over Trump. 100%. No hesitation.
But this ‘ban Trump from Twitter’ crusade, and her conviction it would be a “gotcha” for Warren, showed poor judgement. It was unintelligent.
Harris? Ew. Why?
And his more insane tweets may be losing him support.
I thought Twitter had outright admitted that at least one of his tweets would be considered a violation of the rules from a regular citizen, but was allowed because of the newsworthiness of his being president. No? That’s a pretty specific memory. I have been known to forget things but generally not to have false memories.
Even Warren? I tend to think she would find it too risky to put two women on the ticket.
Count me, along with all the national politics reporters I have read, as seeing Klobuchar having a strong night. And it’s not like I or they were in her corner after other debates.
Sure, assuming that’s what Assad or Putin would prefer happens. 
Speaking of troop levels, several foreign policy type media figures are saying Warren made a major gaffe in declaring that she wants to move all troops out of the Middle East. Thoughts?
I keep hearing this about Gabbard. What’s the source of this accusation, and is there any truth in it?
It’s a nice sentiment. Every politician says it. Not every politician intends to precipitate a crisis by actually following through on it. It takes a very special idiot of low cunning to actually do it (as evidence shows). Warren doesn’t strike me as one of those.