Boomer Opinion: Deconstructing the Debate

We often laugh when we say, What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. But when it comes to this week’s Democratic presidential debate there, nothing could be further from the truth. For as BoomerCafe’s co-founder and executive editor Greg Dobbs writes, the performance and popularity of the six debaters will have far-reaching impact on the outcome of the presidential primaries, and thus on the final election in November. That’s why Dobbs, a journalist who has covered many presidential campaigns (and a few presidents), says in this Boomer Opinion piece that from his place at the table, the campaign’s wild card came and went in the first few minutes of the debate.

The TV debate in Las Vegas drew almost 20 million viewers, and why? Because while all the other Democratic candidates have repeated their talking points often enough that they’ve begun to sound “same old same old” to anyone watching the race, tens of millions of Americans have seen former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s barrage of TV ads across much of the country’s airwaves over the past month, but relatively few have actually seen him in living color, standing on his own, no longer able to narrate scripted remarks unchallenged, put on the spot by his critics, especially where five of those critics came into the debate with their sharp knives all drawn in his direction.

And from the get-go, they drew blood. All of them. Bloomberg took it on the chin and his chin quivered. He never quite recovered.

That’s why, although I know that judging this wild-card candidate in his first debate seems awfully premature, I’ll go out on a limb and proclaim that just 15 minutes into the two-hour debate, Bloomberg already was toast. The reason is this: since Democrats in America overwhelmingly say that their first priority for supporting a candidate is choosing one who could stand up to Donald Trump, we saw in the debate that Bloomberg couldn’t. Given the chance at the outset, he failed to respond to some pretty devastating charges about his treatment of women and Latinos and blacks as well as his own wealth, and whether the charges were true or not, or even fair or not, they sank in because for the first half of the debate, Bloomberg failed to rebut them. To the contrary, he just stood there as if they hadn’t been brought up at all.

But they had. For me, as for millions of others, the point of this debate was to see if Bloomberg, who would bring some assets to the race, could out-Trump Trump. Sorry to say, he probably couldn’t. He was slow to think, inadequate in his responses, and showed flashes of arrogance. He made all the others look better. In America’s quick-fix short-attention-span society, a first impression is often a lasting impression. My lasting impression from Michael Bloomberg’s first debate performance is that in the ring, our take-no-prisoners president would knock Bloomberg to the mat and he’d never get up.

Former Vice President Biden, by the way, had his most articulate and aggressive performance in a debate so far, and he might have been pleased that for the first time, he wasn’t the target of everyone else’s attacks. But at the same time, he might have been insulted that he was ignored more than he was addressed. In any event, Biden still stumbled around for the right words just a little too much, and I think he too would go down in a TKO in a general election debate against Trump. Biden is a good man, and he’ll probably do well in a state like Nevada, but as too many of his public appearances show, his staying power seems limited because he is past his prime. That’s something we just can’t afford in a general election against an incumbent president who seems to have just hit his.

Which in my mind leaves four candidates still standing: Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. Each showed that he or she could throw a punch… and with equal strength and speed, could deflect a punch thrown his or her way.

The biggest punch thrown Buttigieg’s way came from his fellow centrist, Senator Amy Klobuchar, who got fed up with “Mayor Pete’s” apparently canned remarks (as if they don’t all have some at the ready), and called him out on them. But while the former South Bend mayor speaks in more platitudes than probably anyone else, he does it so eloquently, and most of the time so positively, I think it will serve his candidacy well. And, while I wouldn’t bet on him winning the nomination let alone the November election, if he proves me wrong it will serve his presidency and indeed the nation well (after the third-grade rhetoric of the incumbent).

Amy Klobuchar, not for the first time, once again got in some of the most cogent, powerful, crowd-pleasing lines, as also did Elizabeth Warren. At a certain point in the Vegas debate Klobuchar was on the ropes when confronted with a long-ago case that she might have botched back when she was a prosecutor in Minneapolis, but she is definitely at her best when she gets mad, and that made her mad. Amy Klobuchar is smart as a whip.

Elizabeth Warren seems just as smart, but not as homey, and she is so full of plans to fix everything that needs fixing, I’m not convinced she knows how she’d pay for most of them. To adulterate a line that was funny many years ago from Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, “A million here, a million there, soon you’re talking real money.” But with Warren, in the year 2020, it’s “A trillion here, a trillion there…” She’s quick with a plan, but not so quick with an explanation. That will wear thin.

Bernie Sanders, already leading in most polls so far, didn’t do himself any harm in this debate. To the contrary, whether you like his policies or not, he usually explained himself well, vocalizing in a fairly non-threatening way (if you’re not super-rich) what he means by socialism, and clarifying in a fairly accurate way (if you don’t do all the math) how he’d pay for his “Medicare For All” plan. He also showed that despite his opponents’ attacks, he sticks to his principles. Again, whether you like them or not. The trouble with Bernie, if you want to beat Trump, is that he will be painted as a Communist, and it will take, no matter how he tries to explain it away.

Just a few more thoughts:

Greg Dobbs

First, if you have a last name that is not so easy for most people to spell, then a website like PeteForAmerica.com makes a whole lot more sense than AmyKlobuchar.com

Second, we heard more viciousness and vitriol during this Las Vegas debate than we’ve heard in all the debates that came before it. So I’ll bet the chitchat during the last couple of commercial breaks was not very chatty.

Third, when a debate gets as hot as this one did, it’s probably unavoidable that each of the Democrats delivered some devastating ammunition for pro-Trump TV ads during the general election. Alas.

And finally, back to Michael Bloomberg. One woman emailed me during the debate, “He’s a dead frog.” That’s hardly a winning personality, and although personality shouldn’t be the most important part of the job description for a candidate, the reality is, it is. Most voting Americans still weren’t watching the debate Wednesday night, but whatever polls come out in its wake will likely show Bloomberg falling, not rising. I say that based on the live audience’s sometimes downright disdainful reactions to many things he said. And since momentum is what he needs going into Super Tuesday, that will make him toast.