My point being that as Donald Trump has turned the Republican Primary into a bully roaring contest, Bernie Sanders has turned the Democratic primary into a progressive or liberal policy contest. I think it was Hillary Clinton who said during the debate that it was time for a “new New Deal.” I might add here that Bernie's popularity has obviously pushed Hillary farther to the left, and that is a good thing!
So who won the first Democratic Debate? The Democratic Party did. I say this because I believe a majority of the people of this nation really want a government that will work for them to solve problems such as the great disparity in wealth between the top 1 or 2 percent and everyone else. As far as individual candidates are concerned, I do not think there was a clear winner. But here is my assessment:
Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton were clearly the stars of the show, and neither of them was upstaged. Martin O'Malley needed a spectacular performance to command attention. To use a baseball analogy, he hit a lot of singles but did not drive in any runs. While that ain't bad, it won't get him into the all star game. I think Lincoln Chafee and Jim Webb also fell short of what they needed to do to move up to the big game.
Lame stream drama. Debates over policies and qualifications are interesting, even visceral in many instances, but they tend to draw a wonky group rather than an excited crowd. So it was only natural for moderator, Anderson Cooper, to crank up the drama by using some of the crap the Republicans use to rile up their nihilistic base. Thus we had the inevitable questions about Benghazi, Hillary's e-mails, and, horror of all horrors, “Bernie's socialism.”
As with Hillary's overall performance, her defense regarding Benghazi and her e-mails was very competent and workman like. It was, however, Bernie Sander's defense of Hillary Clinton that had the crowd cheering.
"The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails," Sanders said. "Enough of the emails. Let's talk about the real issues facing America." Sanders then went on to tell us what is really important. “We have 27 million people living in poverty,” he said. “We have massive wealth and inequality. It's cost us millions of decent jobs. The American people want to know about whether they'll have a democracy or an oligarchy.”
What pundits would define as a tough question elicited a well deserved slap down by Hillary, by Bernie, and by the audience. Nothing could define the difference between Democrats and Republicans better than Bernie's comments and the reaction to them. The Republicans are trying to sell fear and anti government loathing. The Democrats are trying to sell real policies to deal with real problems. In this regard I think the drama Anderson Cooper got was not at all what he expected. Ah, but there was still the dreaded bogey man called socialism!
When Bernie was asked if he was a capitalist, he said: "Do I not consider myself part of the casino capitalist process by which so few have so much and so many have so little, by which Wall Street's greed and recklessness wrecked this economy? No, I don't."
When Hillary challenged him on his socialistic views Bernie said he was not against the small businesses in this country. The way Bernie defines Democratic Socialism is not much different than Hillary's definition of a new New Deal. Bernie favors stronger reforms than Hillary does, and he is generally more combative in regard to bringing about those reforms. But the differences between Hillary and Bernie are not great enough to make Bernie's supporters stay home if Hillary wins the nomination. Hopefully Hillary's supporters will support Bernie if he is nominated.
A question I have is whether Bernie won over any African American or Hispanic voters. I think he did well in answering questions from Black Lives Matter, but so did Hillary.
No comments:
Post a Comment