Observations of the 3rd Democratic Debate

[nearwildheaven]

From this vantage point, it went on for about an hour and a half too long.

[VOW]

@nearwildheaven

From this vantage point, it went on for about an hour and a half too long.

No shit!
~VOW

[Happy_Lendervedder]

@Lamoral

Biden is rambling incoherently. I have no fucking idea what he just attempted to say.

I was fervently- FERVENTLY!!- praying they would just cut his mic.

My top three prior to the debate:

1. Biden
2. Warren
3. Harris

My top three after it:

1. Warren
2. Booker
3. O’Rourke

[Beckdawrek]

What a mess.

[Ukulele_Ike]

@Lamoral

These candidates are awful. They make me sorely miss Inslee, Bullock, Gabbard, even the Z-list guys like Delaney and Bennet. It’s actually amazing to me how much WORSE this debate has seemed without the bush-league candidates who didn’t make the cut, rather than better. I do not have faith that any of these people can beat Donald Trump. I like Castro, Booker, and Buttigieg but I know goddamn well that none of them are going to get the nomination.

This isn’t going to be pretty.

Seriously? I enjoyed them all immensely*. And any of them is easily less of an illiterate asshole than Trump.

• okay, Klobuchar, my Yale ‘82 classmate, is slightly full of shit. Castro is a prick. But Sanders is still closest to my personal philosophy, Harris and Warren captured my heart, Biden was okay, and Beto, Buttedgeedge, and Booker cheered me up.

[Sterling_Archer]

Yang’s opening statement had me ROFL

Klobuchar, I think, had just said “We have a president who runs this country like a game show host.”

Moments later…

Yang: “And I’m gonna give away $1000/month to ten families watching this debate tonight! Woo!!”

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

According to a FB friend, here’s a transcript of his comment.

@Joe Biden

Biden: “Well, they have to deal with—look, there’s institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Red lining, banks, making sure we are in a position where — look, you talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title I schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the equal raise of, getting out—the $60,000 level. Number two, make sure that we bring in to help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we need — we have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are — I’m married to a teacher, my deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. We have to make sure that every single child does, in fact, have 3, 4 and 5-year-olds go to school. School. Not day care, school. We bring social workers in to homes and parents, to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the phone — make sure that kids hear words, a kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there. There’s so much –“

Moderator: “Thank you, Mr. Vice president. “

Biden: “No, I’m going to go like the rest of them do, twice over. Okay? Because here’s the deal. The deal is that we’ve got this a little backwards. And by the way, in Venezuela, we should be allowing people to come here from Venezuela. I know Maduro. I’ve confronted Maduro. Number two, you talk about the need to do something in Latin America. I’m the guy that came up with $740 million, to see to it those three countries, in fact, changed their system so people don’t have a chance to leave. You’re all acting like we just discovered this yesterday. Thank you very much.

I know that verbatim transcripts can make you sound dumb, but goddamn.

[Chefguy]

Biden can be eloquent when he is speaking, but he gets a bit flustered when attacked.

I think we’ve seen the last of Castro. His attacks were uncalled for and mean. Suggesting that Biden is senile? Really? Not that he wouldn’t make a good Veep.

Buttigieg is thoughtful, lucid, and offering actual solutions, unlike Kamala Harris, who seems unable to say anything other than “We need” “We should” “There needs to be”. Hope is not a strategy; what’s your plan? There’s something about her that puts me off.

I like Klobuchar; she is solid center. She has some good ideas, but not a lot of fire.

Warren is a formidable opponent. I can see her shredding Trump in a debate forum, if he isn’t too big a coward to show up for one. Bernie would also rip him apart. I don’t see Biden doing well in that situation, however; hell, he didn’t even do all that well against that nitwit Palin.

Yang needs to go away. The last thing we need is another businessman who thinks he can run the country.

[Ashtura]

Castro was an ahole. But Biden telling people to turn on their record player for their kids made me think he has legit dementia.

[Wesley_Clark]

I don’t really agree with the Biden hate, but Biden’s ‘this is America’ retort when Sanders was talking about how we spend 2x as much on health care as any other nation was one of the most pathetic political statements I’d ever heard.

Why not just be proud and say ‘this is America’ when talking about how many mass shootings we have. Lots of people don’t believe in American exceptionalism, and to the degree that we do lots of people believe America is exceptional at bad things amongst peer wealthy democracies (mass violence, plutocracy, letting bigotry destroy society, etc)

[SlackerInc]

All that stuff about how many words kids hear is conflatng cause and effect anyway.

[Happy_Lendervedder]

@Wesley_Clark

I don’t really agree with the Biden hate, but Biden’s ‘this is America’ retort when Sanders was talking about how we spend 2x as much on health care as any other nation was one of the most pathetic political statements I’d ever heard.

Why not just be proud and say ‘this is America’ when talking about how many mass shootings we have. Lots of people don’t believe in American exceptionalism, and to the degree that we do lots of people believe America is exceptional at bad things amongst peer wealthy democracies (mass violence, plutocracy, letting bigotry destroy society, etc)

I’m not saying it was a smooth answer, but I took it to mean something along the lines of “This is America, we’ve got a lot more people to insure than the UK or Canada or Denmark.”

[DSeid]

Those last two Biden answers were much worse than debate one’s moment. No gotcha just huh.

I’ve moved to team Warren until proven otherwise now. I hope she proves she’s got the stuff.

[E-DUB]

@SlackerInc

All that stuff about how many words kids hear is conflatng cause and effect anyway.

Slight hijack here. I agree with Joe on this one. I do some volunteer tutoring and I tell kids that words are the “atoms” of thought and speech. And that the more words that you have in your verbal “chemistry set” the more complex the thoughts that you are able to formulate in your head and articulate out of your mouth.

[SlackerInc]

Sure, but it’s the genetics you get from your parents that matter more than the number of words you hear. It’s just that if your parents gave you good genes for intelligence, they also are likely to use a lot of vocabulary words themselves.

[Velocity]

Biden’s stream of consciousness is starting to sound like Trump.

[Aspenglow]

We were spoiled by Obama. Now if our candidates aren’t all quick on their feet, well-spoken, non-flubbing demigods, we are so disappointed.

All the candidates seemed decent and human to me. I’m so ready for one of those.

[Loach]

Moderating:

I’m moving this to Elections. There is already a thread on the debate so the mods there can close or merge if they wish.

[Heffalump_and_Roo]

@SlackerInc

Sure, but it’s the genetics you get from your parents that matter more than the number of words you hear. It’s just that if your parents gave you good genes for intelligence, they also are likely to use a lot of vocabulary words themselves.

I suppose there’s some room to make the causation claim, so I just wanted to add some findings from a study to narrow down the discussion.

Study says reading aloud to children, more than talking, builds literacy

The emphasis on talking more to children to increase their vocabularies is based on research by Betty Hart and Todd Risley at the University of Kansas. They found that parents on welfare spoke about 620 words to their children in an average hour compared with 2,150 words an hour spoken by parents with professional jobs. By age 3, the children with professional parents had heard 30 million more words than the children whose parents were on welfare. Hart and Risley concluded that the more parents talked to their children, the faster the children’s vocabularies grew and the higher the children’s I.Q. test scores were at age 3 and later. Since their research was published, there has been a push to encourage low-income parents to talk more to their children as a way to improve literacy.

[SlackerInc]

With a complete assumption that this is a clear causation arrow, no doubt without correcting for maternal IQ. I saw another similar study that found a big correlation between the number of books in young children’s homes and the likelihood they would later graduate from college. So the social scientists believed the answer was to pull up to underprivileged kids’ homes and carry in crates of books, as though those are magic talismans. Total lack of appreciation for the fact that smart parents tend to have books—and also tend to have smart kids.

To bring it back to what Biden said, if there is any evidence for interventions involving playing tapes or records of speech to young children actually having a notable impact on their later school performance, I haven’t seen it. But if such exists, I would love to hear about it and perhaps have my mind changed.