The stage featured a slog of a debate that covered lots of familiar ground on health care, climate change, foreign policy, abortion, and criminal justice, but did little to narrow the choices for voters who had already seen a bewildering number of candidates visit the state over the last year.
To be sure, Pete Buttigieg appears to have won Iowa, if only very narrowly, by the one metric that matters most: delegates. And it resulted in a polling boost in New Hampshire as it usually does. But the New Hampshire debate suggested it wasn’t enough to completely disrupt the race. Buttigieg did not face an onslaught of attacks the way a traditional frontrunner usually does. Bernie Sanders, who won the state in 2016, is clearly Buttigieg’s main rival in New Hampshire, but there were only a few clashes between the two men to clarify their differences.
Instead of a clear one-on-one dynamic that usually defines the post-Iowa phase, the debate had a buffet of interesting pairings. Buttigieg made a crisp case for generational change to highlight Sanders’ and Joe Biden’s combined 73 years of Washington service. In doing so, he also found a way to pay homage to the Obama-Biden years while also burying it as a bygone era that cannot simply be snapped into reincarnation. And he did so without seeming to attack either man. “Those achievements,” he said of their eight years in office, “were phenomenally important, because they met the moment. But now we have to meet this moment, and this moment is different.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s most important goal in Iowa was to beat Buttigieg. The Massachusetts senator failed but she gets a second chance to try in New Hampshire, a state that has been won by a long line of senators and governors from neighboring Massachusetts, including John Kennedy, Henry Cabot Lodge, Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, John Kerry, and Mitt Romney. On Friday, Warren curiously stuck to the same strategy that failed her in Iowa: a pivot away from policy wonkery, towards a relentless focus on a general anti-corruption message, and eschewing attacks on the candidates who have slipped past her in the polls.
She was asked directly to clarify her differences with Sanders and declined to make the case, offering a vague line about how she can be the “unity” candidate, though not quite spelling out why he can’t. At another point she noted that she and Amy Klobuchar are the only candidates who aren’t either billionaires or benefiting from the help of a super PAC, though it hardly qualifies as going negative. Still, given the jumble of the primary, nobody should be shocked if she finishes near the top of the heap on Tuesday.
Biden and Klobuchar, the two moderates scrambling to contain Buttigieg’s ascent, offered a startling contrast in how to communicate the same political ideas. Biden would offer a meandering, sometimes incoherent attack on Medicare for All or the value of experience, and a few minutes later Klobuchar would crisply make the same point with clarity and in fewer words.
Here’s Biden hitting Sanders on Medicare for All:
Look, Bernie says that you have to bring people together and we have to have Medicare for all. But Bernie says — and he says he wrote the damn thing. But he’s unwilling to tell us what the damn thing is going to cost.
The fact that we’re in New Hampshire, a very level-headed group of people, look at the numbers. How much is it going to cost? Who’s going to pay for it? It will cost more than the entire — the entire federal budget we spend now. More than the entire budget. The idea middle-class taxes aren’t going to go up is just crazy.
When they did it in Vermont, what happened? They doubled the state income tax and then had a 14 percent tax on withholding. And they finally did away with it. So how much is it going to cost? When Bernie — you ask Bernie that — I’ll ask him again tonight — sometime — if you ask Bernie that, he says go figure, I don’t know, we’ll find out. I think that was on CBS. He said we’ll find out, or something to that effect.
Imagine you’re going unite the country, walking into the Congress, and say I got this bill, it’s going to provide Medicare for everybody, I can’t tell you how much it’s going to cost, we’ll find out later, it’s likely to be double whatever the — everything we spend in the federal government. Who do you think is going to get that passed? I busted my neck getting Obamacare passed, getting every Democratic vote. I know how hard it is.
Here’s Klobuchar:
I keep listening to this same debate, and it is not real. It is not real, Bernie, because two-thirds of the Democrats in the Senate are not on your bill and because it would kick 149 million Americans off their current health insurance in four years.
And let me say what else. Elizabeth wants to do it in two years. And, Pete, while you have a different plan now, you sent out a tweet just a few years ago that said, henceforth, forthwith, indubitably, affirmatively, you are for Medicare for All for the ages.
And so I would like to point out that what leadership is about is taking a position, looking at things, and sticking with them. I have long believed that the way that we expand health care to more people and bring down premiums is by building on the Affordable Care Act with a nonprofit public option. That is the best way to do it.
And practically, look at this – the Affordable Care Act is now nearly 10 points more popular than the president of the United States. So why would we talk about blowing it up?
What we need to do is build on it — mental health care, addiction, long-term care — those are the things that would make it better for everyone.
And yet it’s foolish to count either Biden or Klobuchar out. A frontrunner like Biden might have been knocked out of the race after a fourth-place showing in Iowa. But the fog of the results softened the blow. Moreover, he can’t be dismissed because his polling strength with African-American voters has not been tested yet.
Meanwhile, Klobuchar, whose entire campaign rested on a better-than-expected finish in Iowa, failed in that mission and yet there she was on Friday night ignoring the Iowa results and having one of the best performances of any candidate. Her defense of experience was one of the few lines to deflate Buttigieg’s compelling narrative about generational change.
“It is easy to go after Washington,” she said with barely concealed contempt for Buttigieg, “because that’s a popular thing to do. It is much harder — as I see [New Hampshire] Sen. Shaheen in the front row, such a leader — it is much harder to lead and much harder to take those difficult positions. Because I think this going after every single thing that people do because it’s popular to say and makes you look like a cool newcomer, I don’t think that’s what people want right now. We have a newcomer in the White House, and look where it got us. I think having some experience is a good thing.”
Finally, it’s not just that any of the top five candidates are still more than viable, even candidates considered fringe or ludicrous have made a comeback. Andrew Yang flamed out in Iowa, but after failing to qualify for the last debate he was back on it on Friday. And the billionaires are having a moment. Tom Steyer had a strong performance, challenging Biden aggressively on a number of issues, and his polling surge in South Carolina means that his dismal showing in Iowa doesn’t matter as much. And all of this lack of clarity about a strong frontrunner is exactly the scenario that Michael Bloomberg was counting on when he joined the race but skipped the first four states. He was even injected into the debate by moderator George Stephanopoulos, who asked, “Why do you think you’re better positioned than Bloomberg to beat Trump?”
The field of serious post-Iowa contenders is so big that Warren, Klobuchar, and Sanders all had to face the indignity of answering a question about a candidate who isn’t even running here on Tuesday.
The fog of this primary isn’t about to lift anytime soon, and if Democrats squinting through it see someone smiling in the distance, it’s probably Donald Trump.
Source: politico.com
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