With regard to the comments about segregation, he should have defended himself because there was absolutely nothing racist about those comments and even Harris knows it. She just wanted to make him look weak by putting him on the defensive, and she succeeded.
He should have said forcefully, "I said clearly that we didn’t agree on much of anything, but the political reality is that sometimes you have to work with people you don’t like and act like a professional in order to deliver the goods for the American people, and people at home know that.
As for busing, at the time, I admit that I didn’t understand the reality of racism and busing as clearly as I do now. That was a mistake. I own that mistake. In the years since, I’ve opposed apartheid in Africa, fought for voting rights here, fought to improve economic and legal equality here. Unlike some people, I was a public DEFENDER and saw firsthand how minorities and people who don’t have money get mistreated by the legal system. Prosecutors like yourself try to score political points with peoples lives and as a defender I worked for very not much of a salary at all to defend basic civil liberties. I’ll defend my record on civil rights and compare it with anyone’s!"
Hillary wiped the floor with him in the 2016 debates. People who want to vote for Trump are not swayed by logic, policy positions, and debating skills.
Yeah I think people who watch the debates are just looking for subtle behavioral cues. They’re sizing them up. The partisans have already made up their minds; the middlers, however, are trying to use gestures and facial expressions to render personality and character assessments, which are often flawed. That’s why despite winning the debates in terms of substance, Trump still held his own with voters because he was pugnacious, and a lot of voters identified with someone who was fighting against a member of the political establishment.
This is also why Biden’s performance was disastrous. He was put on the defensive. But unlike Buttigieg who at least tried to fight back and glared at that little pipsqueak shit Eric Swalwell, Biden just sat their frozen, with a confused, befuddled, dear in headlights expression. He looked down and away from Harris, which is what some viewers would take to mean as a sign of submission. Everyone in that audience knows that Donald Trump is going to stalk and trash talk the eventual nominee on that debate stage. The last thing they want is someone who looks old, confused, hard of hearing, and submissive and apologetic. I can’t emphasize enough just how disastrous those few moments were in terms of that night and in the news cycle to follow. For some of his audience, I guarantee that the damage is permanent.
I don’t disagree that Biden could still perhaps recover from this - people will eventually move on from this news cycle. However, I read an article today in which some of his handlers have privately complained that he didn’t listen to their input in prepping for the debate. I seem to remember another heavy favorite Democratic front-runner and former member of the Obama White House who also was reported to have had better ideas than her handlers. We saw how that person’s political fortunes unfolded.
As is clear from Happy Lendervedder’s comment, responding to to Harris is a very different beast than responding to Trump. He can’t attack her hard or insult her. This w**as successful at giving the impression he won’t be a good fighter but in point of fact it does not demonstrate it.
I have NO question that Harris would have found an opening for this attack without the specifics of his recent comments. He just made it easier for her. There was going to be a question of race and she would have brought his bussing bit in there no matter what.
Again, he had two good enough options and he chose neither of them.
He could have been successful at stating clearly that he then AND NOW believes that forced bussing would be bad policy. He could argue that he then and now that local communities need to be involved and that looking to bussing as some magical to solve the structural issues was simplistic. In fact bussing rarely worked well which is a large part of why the policy died. On the other hand the things he DID do [quickly list them] actually made differences.
OR, he could state that with the benefit of decades of hindsight his thoughts on bussing have changed. Over decades he and the country have both evolved and he, in many ways has been part of leading that evolution ion the ongoing fight for social justice [same list].
There were decent responses that might have been awkward but not deer in the headlights awkward.
This was one round and she got in a good punch which no doubt knocked him back on his heels some. She also established herself as a brand. Still he won’t completely lose his lead from the one punch and now she is going to a target of others in the pack and below herself.
This got her into the top of the group below him and moved him down some I am sure. And it will get her some media following and website hits for a bit. The question is if she can move into the next level, of having her own message to sell. Hitting Biden again would not go over as well a next time. Now she needs to move into more attacking Trump and even more offering her own positive alternative vision.
If racial justice wasn’t the focus of her campaign it certainly has become one now, since this is the moment which defines not just this campaign but her entire national political career. So I am baffled by the idea that she can just move on without defining her policies on school segregation and busing.
I see this kind of odd disjunction between political reality and woke posturing on the issue of reparations. On the one hand it’s clear from the absence of serious proposals about reparations that Democratic politicians understand that the issue is political poison. On the other, there is there is enormous pressure to pretend to take the issue seriously and say it has to be “studied”.
On forced busing too, the actions of actual Democratic politicians suggest that they understand that Biden was right to oppose it and remains right. No one is seriously proposing bringing it back. At the same time everyone is supposed to pretend to be horrified at Biden’s opposition to forced busing in the 70s.
I’m equally baffled by the idea that a 21st century politician has to have a position on busing. But then, this is a problem Harris brought upon herself.
On a related subject: I’ve heard 2 pundits this week (one on CNN, one on PBS) make the same point: that the candidates are dangerously far out in front of the electorate, by staking positions nobody wants: Medicare for All/no private insurance, health care for undocumented immigrants, making illegal entry a citation instead of a crime. I agree, that this is potentially dangerous – there’s too much at stake this year for bold ideas. The last thing the Democrats need to do is give the electorate any reasons not to vote for their nominee. Fortunately there’s plenty of time to right the course.
That bit where they raised their hands — that’s already out, isn’t it? It’s not like we’re still playing will-they-or-won’t-they for being on the wrong side; they got asked, and they promptly said the quiet part out loud. Sure, they could sell stuff when they hadn’t declared themselves; but after that, where can they go?
Biden is still the one to beat. Harris showed that has the fire and the skills but she’s still a long way from breaking out of the pack below Biden and while this one swing worked well and she can maybe also be seen by more as maybe also being a Trump beater she needs more than that to move into real reach.
It’s interesting. Sanders may be dropping but as he drops some goes to Biden as well as Warren. Harris may take some from Biden but also from Warren.
I’m betting Biden’s numbers in Iowa and NH stay fairly flat even as Harris rises some.
To own his mistake like this would have been an excellent response.
This would have undone it. He was a public defender BEFORE being an anti-busing advocate in the U.S. Senate, not after. Everybody would have said, “sure doesn’t look like you learned anything.”
Anyway, instead of admitting a decades-old mistake, he wound up speaking up for both states’ rights and separate-but-equal. Which is not only really swell from a Democratic POV, but also if he’s the nominee and makes gaffes of a similar quality in the general election, Trump’s gonna slice and dice him.
I have seen a number of people on social media complaining the past couple of days that by damaging Joe Biden, Kamala Harris has undermined the effort to defeat Trump. But I see this as almost like shooting the messenger. They are going through the stages of grief, mourning the idealized Biden they pictured taking on Trump: a younger, sharper, more vigorous version of himself. But Harris didn’t take that Biden away: she simply revealed that he no longer exists (if he ever did).
If everyone on the Democratic side had held their fire and held their breath, cocooning Biden in bubble wrap, it would have only delayed the revelation of his feebleness until it was too late to nominate someone else.
Harris has done us all a service by revealing that Joe is just not up to the task. Much better to learn that now, and start looking for a strong standardbearer to take the fight to Trump.
This is absolutely right, IMO. The Democrats are well-served by a bruising primary in which the strongest fighter emerges. The GOP taught us that lesson last time. This fear of attacking the leader has to go, especially in this populist, social-media-dominated age. If it’s Mayor Pete, or Kamala Harris, so be it. Only by defeating everybody else (and I mean defeating them rhetorically and at the ballot box) can the party find the right person to win in 2020. In retrospect the Michigan primary result in 2016 should have alarmed the Democrats to no end, but instead they whistled past that graveyard.
I’m not gonna necessarily defend Biden by saying he’s not feeble or up to the task, but he isn’t necessarily feeble and out of it. It may have just been a lousy response to an I-WAS-THAT-LITTLE-GIRL! gotcha in the first debate, which happens to be, thankfully, more than 7 months before the first votes are cast. I mean, this dude ate Paul Ryan’s lunch in the 2012 veep debate, so the potential is there. Yes, I get it, that was 7 years ago, but this ain’t Biden’s first rodeo. This is a time for the candidates to sharpen the nominee. If this experience ends up sharpening Joe, I say great. If it ends up being the thing that launches Kamala, alrighty then. If it’s just another talking point in the year-long slog, so be it. But I just don’t necessarily see this as an indication Biden’s out of it.
At the time, I thought owning Paul Ryan was an achievement; turns out Ryan is an intellectual lightweight and a pussy, so I don’t think that’s really a feather in the old man’s cap.
I’m fine with exposing Biden as not up to the task, and the sooner, the better. But I’m not fine with it if the attacks risk fracturing the coalition that Democrats need to bring people out to the polls.
If Biden really were racist and didn’t simply have a history of making off-the-cuff remarks or a history of supporting policies that didn’t age well, I probably wouldn’t have had as much of a problem with Harris’ broadside.
But I guess my concerns go beyond just Harris’ attacks on Biden. As I said before, Biden really should have seen it coming and defended himself better, so part of it’s on him even if the criticism was unfair. A bigger problem is what I saw from the entire field over the course of two nights. The Trump/McConnell era has so enraged the left that they’re being pushed far to the left, and we saw it this week. Yes, there are some moderates, but except for Biden, they’re hardly visible. It’s Biden against a field of very aggressive progressives who apparently want to decriminalize border crossings, and want to give everyone free college and healthcare but don’t really explain how they’re going to pay for it. Before long they’ll get front-running candidates to pledge to reparations. I’m pretty hard left, but the Democrats are painting themselves into a corner that they’re going to have a hard time jumping out of.
But back to the field versus Biden, my concern is that the party will be seen as chasing the only visible white guy out of the race, not because he actually has problematic views and positions on race, but simply because he had some positions in the past that are out of step with what’s considered party orthodoxy today. I don’t have a problem exposing Biden’s history of bad decision making or issues that are relevant to today, but if independents and moderate democrats looking for a reason - any reason - to jump off the Trump train tune into debates and see white candidates getting litmus tested to determine which among them is sufficiently ‘woke’, that’s a problem. The Democratic party is better than the Republican party because it values inclusion, but it can’t be the ‘no country for old white men’ party. Whites moderates will simply stay home or vote for candidates who don’t know what Aleppo is.
Toeing the orthodox line is more important than victory for too many of the more left wing folks. Particularly the ones who are younger. Compromise and pragmatism are dirty words.
I like to see who the right-wing are smearing at the moment to get a sense of who they see as the current biggest threat. Suddenly there are a lot of anti-Harris messages circulating which appear to be designed to undermine her potential support from minority voters - not just the “Kamala is a cop” meme but, more recently, “Harris isn’t really black”.
As a moderate Democratic voter I do see some of this increasing on the left. But they still have a long way to go before the party as a whole is less willing to compromise than the right.
I don’t think the problem is that the left is unwilling to compromise; the more likely danger is that culture war politics redirects the emphasis away from unifying themes and puts more spotlight on themes that, while important to address in terms of policy, are less likely to unify progressives of all stripe.