Warren Emerges Unscathed on First Night of Democratic Debate
Her lower-polling rivals didn’t challenge her claim to being the strongest alternative to front-runner Joe Biden.
(Bloomberg) -- Senator Elizabeth Warren stood center stage on the first night of the Democratic debate — and emerged unscathed. Her lower-polling rivals did nothing to knock her off course and didn’t challenge her claim to being the strongest alternative to front-runner Joe Biden.
“None of them have laid a glove on her,” said Mary Anne Marsh, a Boston-based Democratic consultant.
Not once in the two-hour debate in Miami did any of the nine other candidates turn to Warren and challenge her. It was a gift that allowed her to stick to her stump speech and deliver a progressive message to millions of people on everything from the corrosive effect of corporate money to gun control, without getting distracted or having to react to a sharp retort.
In many ways, the debate was fought on Warren’s turf, with a focus on income inequality, busting corporate power and battling Republicans in Congress. She showed her command on policy issues animating the Democratic base, like health care and clean energy, as the party’s voters try to choose a candidate to challenge President Donald Trump in 2020.
“When you’ve got a government, when you’ve got an economy that does great for those with money and isn’t doing great for everyone else, that is corruption, pure and simple,” Warren said. “We need to call it out. We need to attack it head on. And we need to make structural change in our government, in our economy, and in our country.”
But that conversation devolved at times into a debate over just how far and how fast the Democratic Party should remake the economy, level the playing field for workers and erase Trump’s legacy. Warren represents the more liberal end of the party, while others on the stage -- such as Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota -- warned Democrats against promising more than they can deliver on health care or ideas like free college tuition.
“I am just concerned about kicking half of Americans off their health insurance in just four years,” Klobuchar said.
The squabbling is likely to continue on Thursday night, when a second group of 10 candidates will debate. The focus will turn to Biden, who will be joined by another of the party’s leading progressives, Bernie Sanders, along with Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez told CNN on Thursday that the format for the debate worked, despite the large number of politicians sharing the stage. “Every candidate got a chance to articulate their vision,” he said.
Biden wasn’t mentioned by name on Wednesday, even though the former vice president towers over the field as the candidate to beat. Sanders and Warren are vying for second place.
Yet Warren gave Republicans a ready-made attack ad for a general election by raising her hand in response to a question from the moderators about which candidates would abolish private insurance. She favors a Medicare for All system pushed by Sanders, which would eliminate most private coverage and cancel millions of insurance plans, a position that some Democrats say is politically suicidal.
“We’ll lose by 10 points,” John Delaney, a former Maryland congressman, said after the debate.
But Delaney, whose campaign indicated earlier he planned to go after Warren for her support of a single-payer system, held back during the debate. Instead, he made his case against the policy without naming her.
Early on, Klobuchar was asked if ideas like Warren’s are too far-reaching or impractical, but she refrained from attacking the Massachusetts senator. Cory Booker wouldn’t bite when asked if he agreed with Warren’s call for attacking corporations by name.
Several skirmishes broke out among lesser-known candidates. Julian Castro and Beto O’Rourke butted heads over whether to decriminalize migration. Tulsi Gabbard and Tim Ryan argued over military interventions. Klobuchar delivered a sharp retort to Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington State, after he expressed his support for abortion rights, pointing out that the women on stage had also done so.
In one of the sharpest exchanges of the night, Castro and O’Rourke, who’ve crossed paths for years as rising stars among Texas Democrats, tussled over whether to eliminate a law that criminalizes unauthorized border crossings, which O’Rourke opposes.
Hinting at the frequent knock on O’Rourke as insufficiently focused on policy, Castro told him: “I think that you should do your homework on this issue - if you did your homework on this issue, you would know we should repeal this section.”
Attacks on Trump were sparse throughout the debate, with just a few policy critiques and zingers. The Democratic contenders have calculated that there is little to gain at this point from focusing on the president because they unanimously oppose his policies — it doesn’t distinguish them.
Trump, who was traveling to Japan for a summit of the Group of 20 nations delivered his verdict in a tweet sent during a stopover in Alaska: “BORING!”
Shortly after the debate, his campaign issued a statement that said the “the far-left, socialist policies Democrats embraced tonight were akin to a mutual political suicide pact."
Klobuchar at one point in the debate poked fun at Trump, saying he “is literally every single day 10 minutes away from going to war, one tweet away from going to war. And I don’t think we should conduct foreign policy in our bathrobe at 5:00 in the morning, which is what he does.”
--With assistance from Joshua Green.
To contact the reporters on this story: Sahil Kapur in Miami at skapur39@bloomberg.net;Tyler Pager in Miami at tpager1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, Max Berley, John Harney
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