Democratic presidential candidate Senator Kamala Harris in the spin room after the Democratic primary debate hosted by NBC News in Miami on Friday. Photos / AP
The big question going into Friday's debate was whether Joe Biden would stumble.
That turned out to be the wrong one. The right question was whether he had ample vigor in his stride.
And the answer came in watching Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg — two of the event's standout performers — run articulate and impassioned circles around him.
Biden, the clear front-runner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, was okay. Not bad, not good: okay. He didn't crumble under some tough interrogation from moderators — about his vote for the invasion of Iraq, for example — and occasional attacks from his rivals onstage.
But in his determination to prove how coolheaded he could be, he turned his temperature down too low. In his insistence on not getting tangled in grand promises or lost in the weeds, he too often kept to the side of the field.
At one point, when candidates were asked to raise their hands if they believed that crossing the border without documentation should be a civil rather than criminal offence, his gesture was so tentative and ambiguous that one of the moderators, José Díaz-Balart, had to follow up: Was he indicating his assent or seeking permission to make a comment?
That was a metaphor for his whole night.
Other candidates demanded that America march forward. Biden kept looking backward. He repeatedly alluded to his decades of experience and even more pointedly reminded voters of his eight-year partnership with US President Barack Obama, a towering figure in the Democratic Party. While Bernie Sanders pledged a revolution, Biden promised a restoration.
Will that make voters feel tingly enough? It's possible, given the ongoing trauma of the Trump years.
But the debate laid bare the shortcomings of his candidacy and the risks of graduating him to the general election.
When you've been in politics and in Washington as long as he has — 36 years in the Senate, plus eight as Vice-President — there are votes and quotes from eras much different from the current one, controversial positions galore and mistakes aplenty. All of these were ammunition used against him, most electrically when Harris pressed him to defend his opposition to busing to integrate schools.
Harris made it personal, telling him that she got the education she did because of busing. Biden said that he hadn't been opposed to busing so much as in favour of local decision-making, and he thus left himself open to her righteous response: Did he not think that the federal government should swoop in to remedy obvious racial injustice?
"That's why we have the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act," she said. "Because there are moments in history where states fail to preserve the civil rights of all people."
What happened across the two days of debates was fascinating. It ratcheted up the suspense of the nascent Democratic contest; it underscored the difficulty of figuring out the toughest adversary for Trump.
The supposedly safest or most tested candidates (Biden, Sanders) proved to be the least exciting ones. The moderates (Amy Klobuchar, Michael Bennet, John Hickenlooper) couldn't quite break through. And none of the top five performers — Harris, Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Julián Castro and Cory Booker — fit the demographic profiles of presidents past. Two of them are women, three are people of colour, and the one who is neither of those things is gay.
Would that make them risky nominees or bold ones? The stakes of answering that unanswerable question correctly are enormous.
All of them except Warren is under 60, and the generational divide between them and Biden, 76, and Sanders, 77, was stark during Friday's event, partly because Buttigieg, 37, and Eric Swalwell, 38, made sure to highlight it.
At the very start of the night, Swalwell noted mischievously that Biden had long ago stressed the importance of passing the torch, and Swalwell exhorted Democrats to do precisely that, saying "pass the torch" so many times that Díaz-Balart asked Biden, "Would you like to sing a torch song?" Biden then rattled off a few canned remarks about the importance of education.
Biden and Sanders suffered in part from familiarity. They've been around. I couldn't detect any difference between Sanders now and Sanders four years ago: The mad gleam, bad mood and hoarse-from-yelling voice were all the same. A screenwriter friend of mine emailed me midway through the event to say that Sanders resembled "a very angry chess player in Washington Square Park in an undershirt and madras shorts in the summer heat." He did indeed look steamed.
Morning Consult/@FiveThirtyEight Dem Polll
— Political Polls (@PpollingNumbers) June 28, 2019
(Changes: before/after second night of debates)
Biden 32 (-)
Harris 17 (+10)
Sanders (17)
Warren 14 (-3)
Buttigieg 5 (-)
Booker 3 (-1)
Castro 2 (-)
O’Rourke 2 (-1) https://t.co/iIyBLNb8eG
Buttigieg didn't. He has this way — it's quite remarkable — of expressing outrage without being remotely dishevelled by the emotion, of taking aim without seeming armed, of flagging grave danger without scaring the pants off you. He's from some perfect-candidate laboratory, no?
And nobody onstage spoke with more precision and shrewdness, though Bennet came close a few times. Buttigieg said that the God-garbed Republican Party, in its treatment of migrants, "has lost all claim to ever use religious language again." It wasn't just a dig; it deftly brought to mind his public fight with Mike Pence over Pence's vilification of LGBT people.
On the subject of health insurance, Buttigieg said that sick people "can't be relying on the tender mercies of the corporate system." He spoke of China "using technology for the perfection of dictatorship." Phrases like these came like candies from a Pez dispenser — colourful, sweet and one after the other.
When Buttigieg was confronted about the recent police shooting of a black man in South Bend, Indiana, where he is mayor, and asked why the police force wasn't better integrated, he admitted, bluntly: "Because I couldn't get it done." He didn't make excuses.
Harris had a visible, palpable fire that he lacked. It was mesmerising. She challenged Biden not just on busing but on sloppy recent comments of his that seemed affectionate toward segregationists. She picked apart Trump's boasts of a spectacularly booming economy, telling the right number of right anecdotes at the right time.
Kamala Harris' highly scripted attack on Biden was utterly predictable -and caught him unready to answer. If he cannot cope with her, how will he cope with the random manic aggression of Donald Trump next year? https://t.co/w5AfwuGddf
— David Frum (@davidfrum) June 28, 2019
And she mixed strength with warmth and even humour. As candidates shouted over one another in a lunge for microphone time, she found a cranny of oratorical space in which to land a good line. "Hey, guys, you know what?" she said. "America does not want to witness a food fight. They want to know how we're going to put food on their table."
Imagine a Harris-Buttigieg ticket, and not only what a wealth of poise but what a double scoop of precedents that would be. Plenty of people on Twitter have been doing precisely that. It's delicious to ponder how the two of them might rattle Trump in all his faux macho boorishness.
But there's potentially grave danger in how far to the left — on healthcare, immigration and more — Warren, Harris and the other debate standouts have moved. For example, both Warren and Harris indicated at their debates that they would eliminate private health insurance in favour of "Medicare for All" (though Harris later insisted that she'd misheard a moderator's question about that and in fact wouldn't do so). That might turn off and scare away voters that a Democratic nominee absolutely needs.
The alternative? Not Biden, not based on his debate performance, with his herky-jerky delivery and reflexive glances in the rearview mirror. Elections, according to all the political sages, are about the future. Biden didn't seem to be pointed in that direction, and he didn't demonstrate any sense of hurry to get there.
Written by: Frank Bruni
© 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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