The Democratic Shoutfest in South Carolina Was the Worst Political Debate I Ever Saw
Feb 26, 2020
There was a moment, right at the beginning of Tuesday night’s Democratic debate, when things could have gone in a different and more thoughtful direction. Elizabeth Warren was gently—too gently, by many people’s standards—poking Bernie Sanders by saying that they both shared popular progressive policy programs but that she was best suited to act on them as president.
Bernie is winning right now because the Democratic Party is a progressive party and progressive ideas are popular ideas, even if there are a lot of people on this stage that don’t want to say so. Bernie and I believe in a lot of things, but I think I would make a better president.
The stage was set right there for a discussion of the limits of progressive politics within the Democratic Party. All of the others could have jumped in at that point; Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar and Joe Biden could have given the audience a look at where they thought the limits were, and Biden could have provided a long view of how hard it is to get progressive ideas through our political process. Instead, Buttigieg decided to set up the Bloomberg-Sanders binary so he could position himself as being the national trank gun, whereupon the hot spittle and steaming bile erupted and the moment was lost, alas.
Make no mistake. This was the worst political debate I ever saw, and the reason for that was the moderators. None of them had the faintest idea what their jobs were or how to do them. It was also a more-than-marginally corrupt enterprise; CBS allowed one of Michael Bloomberg’s ads to run during one of the commercial breaks, which was inexcusable. Seats were sold for a $1,700 minimum “sponsorship” to the South Carolina Democratic Party. And the paradigmatic moment came when Bloomberg, under fire from Warren for all the money he’d raised for Republican senatorial candidates, including Scott Brown when he was running against her in 2012, came right up to the edge of saying that he’d bought the 2018 Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives. In 40 short years, we’ve come from, “I've paid for this microphone, Mr. Green!” to, a de facto, “I’ve paid for this majority, Ms. Pelosi.” A long way, baby.
Warren’s needling of Sanders presented an opportunity for substantive discussion of how progressive ideas can make it through our politics. It was missed.
On stage, nobody shut up. Everybody talked over everybody else, and then got angry at the moderators when those sad sacks finally tried to restore order by enforcing a time limit that everybody ignored. I’ve seen better organized soccer riots. And while I have no doubt that channels were changed all over America, and the polls may make me a liar over this, I doubt profoundly that any minds were changed—except, again, for those belonging to the Bloomberg-curious among us. He was a mess, but not as hot a mess as he was in the Nevada debate. For her part, Senator Professor Warren did not complain about the moderators or the format, delivered her material with learned dispatch, and was probably the best behaved of the bunch, as much good as that will do her when the spin really starts to set in.
Sanders took the most incoming, as everyone expected. He’d had a week in which he’d proven that, as a frontrunner, he’s a target-rich environment. Even Warren took a pop at him on his healthcare plan, pointing out that, when she produced her plan with its precise cost figures, the online weasel patrol that attends the Sanders campaign lied about it and about her. That set off the same general scrum over healthcare policy that’s been a running feature of these debates for over a year now. But the main event was the attempt by the rest of the field, Warren excepted, to pin some of Sanders’s ancient quotes on him regarding Fidel Castro and Cuba. Sanders looked beleaguered and cranky, so much so that, when Buttigieg finally opened the floodgates on his formidable reservoir of sanctimony, Sanders whiffed on it.
"I am not looking forward to a scenario where it comes down to Donald Trump with his nostalgia for the social order of the 1950s, and Bernie Sanders with a nostalgia for the revolutionary politics of the 1960s. ... We're not gonna win these critical House and Senate races if people in these races have to explain why the nominee of the Democratic Party is telling people to look at the bright side of the Castro regime.”
How could Sanders miss on this? Maybe, while he’s in South Carolina, Buttigieg could drive on up to Orangeburg, where, in February of 1968, fired by the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, three students were shot down while trying to integrate a local bowling alley. Or he could discuss how the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, as expressed at the Stonewall Inn in New York, was still relevant to our lives today. Or he simply could walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge a couple of times. I’m nostalgic for a lot of that. This was “OK, Boomer” shot through with a kind of entitled contempt for the importance of historical memory.
This was “OK, Boomer” shot through with a kind of entitled contempt for the importance of historical memory.
Of course, I didn’t anticipate a 2020 debate in which the climate crisis was barely mentioned, but which had an entire middle section dedicated to a Cold War cage-match between Zombie Dean Acheson and Zombie Adlai Stevenson. The whole field missed a golden opportunity during a discussion of the crisis in rural healthcare to link that crisis to the refusal of Republican governors to accept the FREE MONEY! available through the Affordable Care Act and then link that to Chief Justice John Roberts’s sabotage of that part of the ACA in his famous decision upholding the rest of the law. The Republicans are still there, doing what they do. They don’t have fights like this. They have the quick and the dead.
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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.
