Twice near the start of the last Democratic presidential debate, George Stephanopoulos of ABC News tried to pin Elizabeth Warren down on whether her vision for Medicare for All would require a middle-class tax increase. Twice she didn’t answer him. It was the perfect opening for one of the other contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination to charge her with evasiveness and force her to reckon fully with the costs of her ambitious plans and the profound difficulty of enacting them.
None of them took advantage of it.
Warren condemned the corruption of the political process by moneyed interests. I kept waiting for one of her rivals onstage to point out that before she swore off private fundraisers organized by rich donors, she depended on them for her two victorious Senate campaigns, raising enough cash to transfer $10.4 million in leftover funds to her 2020 presidential bid. But no one made a peep.
As she surged toward the front of the pack, the candidates in her wake watched politely for the most part, not confronting her with the tough questions that, if she faces Donald Trump in the general election, he’ll surely hurl at her. That has to stop.
At the debate this coming Tuesday night, they should grill her — and one another — with less delicacy than they have exhibited to date. Assuming that Trump lasts until November 2020, he’s going to use every potentially unflattering detail of his opponent that he can dig up, along with the usual heap of lies, to attack him or her. The nation can’t afford for those attacks to be successful. So now is the time, well before the voting in caucuses and primaries begins, to size up the various Democratic candidates’ hypocrisies, half-truths and vulnerabilities. Perhaps more important, it’s the time to discover how persuasively they can explain the parts of their biographies and records that cry out for some explanation.
I began this column by focusing on Warren because she seems to be the candidate with the most momentum at the moment and, based on the current state of play, she could very well be the nominee. But everyone in the relatively changeless Top 5 in the Democratic field — Warren, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg — hasn’t been pressed by rivals on some matters that warrant more attention.
Buttigieg has made an argument for his youth — he’s 37 — as an asset, and he boasts of crucial executive experience from his seven years as mayor of South Bend, Indiana. But it’s a city so small that he won his second term with 8,515 votes. He’d probably need more than 65 million to ascend to the presidency. One of his rivals would be right to ask him: What should give Democrats confidence that he has that kind of jackpot in him? What gives him the confidence, especially given his strained relations with black residents of South Bend and the coolness of black voters nationwide to his candidacy?
Someone should pin Harris down on why her initial statements about Medicare for All were so contradictory, just the way Tulsi Gabbard, in a July debate, challenged her on aspects of her work as the district attorney of San Francisco and then as the California attorney general that don’t fit neatly under the “progressive prosecutor” mantle that she claims. Gabbard’s engagement of Harris on that issue stood out because few candidates poked that directly and forcefully at their rivals’ vulnerabilities.
Harris’ engagement of Biden, in a June debate, on the issue of federally mandated busing to desegregate schools stood out for the same reason. And it shed important light on both him and her. He struggled to respond effectively, demonstrating how dulled some of his political skills were, while she made subsequent comments that raised questions about just how divergent their positions really were. Democratic voters came to know both candidates better and to be able to assess them more accurately. And that’s the whole goal of these debates.
Everyone in that Top 5 has liabilities. It’s possible that Democrats would be on safer ground with any of the candidates below that tier — Amy Klobuchar, say, or Michael Bennet or Steve Bullock — who have won statewide elections in red, purple or purple-ish places. It’s also possible that Klobuchar, Bennet and Bullock lack the requisite spark and are bad fits for the moment.
The only way to know is to make sure there’s no premature coronation.
So Biden’s rivals onstage on Tuesday night should ask if him if anything that he and President Barack Obama did, or failed to do, inadvertently paved the way for Trump. I’d be fascinated, and potentially illuminated, by his response.
They should ask Warren how she can be sure that her morally just “wealth tax” will raise as much money and pay for as much as she says it will. And because she keeps stressing her passion for education, she should be pressed on how she swerved from past positions that essentially aligned her with Betsy DeVos to the opposite.
If she can’t answer the question well, let’s find out now, before it’s too late. If she can, she’s one step closer to wiping the floor with Trump.