Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.(Matt Rourke / AP Photo)
The Democratic primary debate in Charleston, South Carolina, should have been a do-or-die moment for many campaigns, but it is likely to be remembered mostly as a dud. It was a shambling mess: badly organized and confusing, with candidates often talking over each other or trying to navigate muddled questions.
Both CBS News and the Democratic National Committee deserve blame. The fact that the audience was playing favorites by booing and cheering added to the distraction. To top it all off, it wasn’t even a fairly representative audience. Tickets started at $1,750 and went up to $3,200.
This meant that the audience skewed rich. No wonder they booed when Elizabeth Warren attacked Michael Bloomberg.
The debate has been nearly universally panned. Jon Lovett of Crooked Media was moved to an all-caps lament: “THIS IS A TERRIBLE DEBATE.” James Fallows of The Atlantic agreed, writing that the “previous one was good and enlightening. This one is bad and murkifying.” Richard Kim of HuffPost (and formerly of The Nation) had a similar reaction, noting, “this debate was as bad as the last debate was good.” The novelist Mat Johnson thought “this is officially the worst debate I’ve ever seen.”
Yet the very badness of the debate might serve the interests of the two front-runners, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. As former Obama adviser David Axelrod argued, “Biden had a good night … he was energetic and strong and emphatic.” Axelrod also noted, “Sanders by and large handled the attacks pretty well.”
The advantage of a befuddling debate was that it muddled the attacks against Sanders that the other candidates were trying to make. As the front-runner, Sanders was a natural target, all the more because the moderate wing of the party doesn’t want him to become the Democratic nominee.
Various rivals went after Sanders. Pete Buttigieg was perhaps the most insistent, but, in light of his fading status, lacked the stature to attack the senator. Buttigieg came across as an annoying younger brother trying to get his older siblings to pay attention.
Michael Bloomberg and Amy Klobuchar also took potshots at Sanders, sometimes assisted by the moderators, who offered talking points. They warned of the dangers of the socialist label, upbraided Sanders for praising Cuba’s educational record, and in general tried to present him as a candidate with an electability problem.
But on the whole, these attacks weren’t very strong. Sanders fended them off well, and any negative effect got lost in the cross talk. For long stretches of the debate, Sanders wasn’t even audible, neither talked about nor talking.
Being allowed to fly under the radar like this might serve Sanders well. He had more to lose from a dramatic debate than anyone, so just holding steady is a win.
The same might be said for Joe Biden, who is still the front-runner for the South Carolina race, although Sanders is catching up. By the metrics of shoring up his base, Biden did well. He was forceful and on message. He won much applause for his promise to appoint an African American woman to the Supreme Court. He kept alluding to his record as Obama’s vice president and his experience on the world stage. Biden made the case for himself as a tough, experienced, and trustworthy leader.
Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
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Early in the debate, a moderator tried to address a question to Biden, but Buttigieg kept butting in. Biden finally got a word in edgewise by saying, “Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. I guess the only way you do this is jump in and speak twice as long as you should.”
On another occasion, Biden stopped halfway through a question and asked, “Why am I stopping? No one else stops.” A moderator responded, “You’re a gentleman.” Biden took the compliment and said, “Gentlemen don’t get very well treated up here.”
But, in fact, this very quality of not being preening peacocks might have benefited both Sanders and Biden. They both got across the message they needed to their core voters. The debate was a food fight more than a reasoned discourse. They survived it. They’re more likely than their rivals to do well in South Carolina and on Super Tuesday.
Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.