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Highlights From the September Democratic Debate 6 Takeaways From the September Democratic Debate
(32 minutes later)
Candidates: Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Kamala Harris, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, the entrepreneur Andrew Yang, Senator Cory Booker, former Representative Beto O’Rourke, Senator Amy Klobuchar and former housing secretary Julián Castro. Thursday’s Democratic primary debate was the first time all the leading candidates were onstage together. The most illuminating exchanges were not between Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Elizabeth Warren, who met onstage for the first time, but from other pairings. Here are six highlights from the debate.
ABC is determined to end this debate with a soft-focus question to the candidates about how they’ve overcome a professional setback. Once again this debate season, Mr. Biden came under the fiercest and most sustained scrutiny, from his ideological foes, from a former cabinet mate and even from the moderators. He was pushed on race, on deportations, on health care and, in an intense exchange, on his age.
Mr. Biden pivoted to a rambling recitation of his painful, personal setbacks: the car crash that killed his first wife and infant daughter, his son Beau’s death from brain cancer. But in the end, Mr. Biden exited the stage the same way he entered it: the embattled-yet-clear front-runner, no matter if his meandering syntax and twisting verbal gymnastics sometimes failed to land clear points.
Ms. Warren spoke of being dismissed from her first public school teaching job when she became pregnant. One difference from the past two debates: He did begin to articulate more of his own case for the White House, rather than simply saying President Trump must be stopped. In particular, Mr. Biden came armed on the crucial topic of health care, with lines to joust with Senator Bernie Sanders and Ms. Warren over their support of an expansive Medicare for All plan.
Mr. Sanders reminded the audience that when he first ran for office in Vermont he received 1 percent of the vote for Senate, and then 2 percent for governor. “I know that the senator says she’s for Bernie, well, I’m for Barack,” Mr. Biden said to Ms. Warren, speaking not only about the Affordable Care Act but also the legacy of a popular former president.
And Mr. Buttigieg told of his internal personal conflict about coming out as a gay man while he up for re-election as mayor of South Bend. The Biden strategy to bearhug Mr. Obama at every opportunity was questioned by rivals, but none figured out how to drive a wedge between the two men.
In the absence of closing statements, these personal anecdotes serve to leave the debate viewers with a sense of who the candidates are without diving too far into their policy prescriptions. By evening’s end, however, Mr. Biden’s performance was uneven. Asked about a comment decades ago in regards to reparations for slavery — “I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago” — he ended up talking about playing the radio for small children to expand their vocabulary, and used an outdated reference if there ever was one.
In one of the toughest phrased questions of the night, Mr. Biden was asked about saying four decades ago that “I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago” in regards to reparations for slavery. “Make sure you have the record player on at night,” he said.
He delivered a long and winding answer that began speaking about “institutional segregation” and ended up talking about keeping a “record player on at night” so poor children learn new words. It was Mr. Biden’s most tweeted about line of the night.
In between, he spoke about education, raising teacher salaries to $60,000, the ratio of school psychologists, the fact that he is married to a teacher (as well as his late wife), and expanding schools to 3- and 4-year-olds. While Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders argued to her right, and Julián Castro lobbed grenades at Mr. Biden from her left, Ms. Warren walked away unscathed.
“Play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the — make sure that kids hear words, a kid coming from a very poor schoo— a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time we get there,” Mr. Biden said. Nobody attacked her. Nobody questioned her electability. Nobody said anything she’s done in her life was misguided. She wasn’t involved in the night’s most memorable exchanges.
The moderators tried to call time. In other words, she was exactly where she wanted to be.
“No,” Mr. Biden said, “I’m going to go like the rest of them do — twice over.” He pivoted to Venezuela briefly. For the one candidate in the race who has been steadily rising in the polls and seen her popularity among Democratic primary voters increase, Ms. Warren once again got off scot-free in a presidential primary debate. She didn’t instigate tension with the other candidates, and nobody said anything about her.
“Well, that was quite a lot,” Mr. Castro said when his turn came. Along the way, Ms. Warren was able to define herself as the candidate with specific plans without getting into the muck of those arguing over policy specifics.
As the debate delved into foreign policy, Mr. Biden, without being asked, brought up and lamented his 2002 vote to authorize President George W. Bush to launch the Iraq war. This approach has fed her steady rise from the mid-single digits to a virtual tie for second place with Mr. Sanders, and it will take another debate to see if anyone in the field will try to stop her.
“I should have never voted to give Bush the authority to go in and do what we said he was going to do,” Mr. Biden said. Mr. Sanders walked onto the stage with an offensive plan — attack Mr. Biden.
He went on to say he opposed Mr. Bush’s execution of the war that he voted to authorize. On health care, trade and the Iraq war, the Vermont socialist took square aim at the former vice president. It was a choreographed onslaught of Mr. Sanders’s greatest hits, allowing him to argue over and over that he is the tribune of the left wing of the Democratic Party while Mr. Biden has been beholden to corporate interests and would not be a true agent of change.
“What I was arguing against in the beginning, once he started to put the troops in, was that in fact we were doing it the wrong way, there was no plan, we should not be engaged, we didn’t have the people with us, we didn’t have our allies with it,” Mr. Biden said. The question is, will it change things?
There was no way Mr. Sanders was going to let that go, and he did not. He took square aim at the polling front-runner, once again drawing a stark distinction between the two men. Aides for both Mr. Sanders and Mr. Biden agree the two are fighting over the same subset of voters: a lower-income, less-educated set of the electorate who are not paying close attention to the day-to-day proceedings of the presidential campaign.
“The truth is, the huge mistake, and one of the differences between you and me is that I never believed what Cheney and Bush said,” he said. “I voted against the war in Iraq and led the opposition to it.” No one is quite clear on what will happen if Mr. Biden starts bleeding support. Iowa surveys show Mr. Sanders is the leading second-choice candidate among Mr. Biden’s backers. But several others — Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., most explicitly among those onstage Thursday — are touting themselves as a Biden-style unifier who can win over moderate Republicans in a general election.
In the first nearly 100 minutes of debate, the Democratic field was cleaved between aggressors, defenders and relative wallflowers, with most of the attacks continuing to be aimed at Mr. Biden, whose durability atop the polls has taken some rivals by surprise. As for Mr. Biden, he defended himself from the Sanders onslaught and lobbed a few shots back at his fellow septuagenarian. He reminded the audience that Mr. Sanders is “a socialist” and suggested he has confidence in corporate America to fix the health care system, a confusing argument Mr. Sanders let be.
The candidates sparred, yet again, over health care policy, what to do about institutional racism, guns and trade. If Senator Kamala Harris’s plan in the first Miami debate was to take on Mr. Biden, her objective in Houston seemed to be to pivot to the politically safer terrain of attacking Mr. Trump. Indeed, she addressed him directly in her opening statement, ending it with this: “Now, President Trump you can go back to watching Fox News.”
Mr. Biden stumbled at times over some specifics but delivered a more forceful defense of his record than at the two earlier debates. Some landed some early offensive framing of his own, particularly with Ms. Warren who has close the polling gap on him. The crowd roared.
“I know that the senator says she’s for Bernie, well, I’m for Barack,” Mr. Biden said, speaking of health care but really about much more. One liners are a fact of life in political debates. But string too many together in one setting and they can go from zinging to cloying, and Ms. Harris had a noticeable number of set pieces that sounded rehearsed on Thursday. (Ms. Klobuchar — “Houston we have a problem,” she said in Houston — rivaled her.)
For the most part, Ms. Warren was willing to fade from the center stage spot she had secured for herself, making her case against political corruption more than against any particular rival as he ongoing truce with Mr. Sanders continued to hold. The president, Ms. Harris said, “conducts trade policy by tweet.”
The most aggressive candidate onstage was Mr. Castro, who questioned Mr. Biden both on policy and, pointedly, his memory. And on the hate-fueled shooting in El Paso, Ms. Harris said that Mr. Trump “didn’t pull the trigger, but he certainly been tweeting out the ammunition.”
“Are you forgetting what you said just two minutes ago?’ Mr. Castro questioned the former vice president. Those two are well-worn from Ms. Harris’s appearances on the stump. She had new lines, too.
Mr. Booker and Mr. Buttigieg, who have framed their candidacies as healers and uniters, tried at times to intervene in the food fighting, as Mr. O’Rourke used the emotional resonance of the recent shooting in El Paso to break through the din with an emotional call to confiscate assault-style rifles. “He reminds me of that guy in “The Wizard of Oz,” when you pull back the curtain, it’s a really small dude,” she said of Mr. Trump at another point.
Ms. Harris, meanwhile, made it plain from her opening statement what he plan was: to not debate her rivals onstage but pivot to President Trump at every opportunity, often with preplanned lines. The lines all landed individually. Collectively, they left the distinct impression of a politician.
“He reminds me of that guy in “The Wizard of Oz,” when you pull back the curtain, it’s a really small dude,” she said to laughs. It was the line of the night, for better or worse.
Mr. Yang and Ms. Klobuchar mostly faded from view unless called upon. Mr. Castro, the former Obama housing secretary, who parried with Mr. Biden on deportation policy in the last debate, went for the jugular this time: questioning the 76-year-old’s mental agility in an exchange about the particulars of health care policy.
Mr. O’Rourke is no longer standing at center stage. And it showed on Thursday because his rivals kept praising him for his role in healing the community in El Paso after the recent shooting. “Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago,” Mr. Castro, 44, asked Mr. Biden. He then repeated himself for emphasis. “Are you forgetting already what you said just two minutes ago?”
Mr. Biden first: “The way he handled what happened in his hometown is meaningful.” Ms. Harris: “Beto, god love you for standing to courageously in the midst of that tragedy.” It was the most tweeted about moment of the entire debate.
When Mr. O’Rourke got his chance, his voice rose in a crescendo as he invoked a curse word — albeit one that can air on national television, calling for mandatory buybacks of assault rifles. And while others have made the case for generational change and new leadership, Mr. Castro’s frontal assault on Mr. Biden’s acuity, and by extension the his age, left some Democrats shocked. (After the debate, Mr. Castro said on ABC, “I wasn’t taking a shot at his age.”)
“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47. We’re not going to allow it to be used against a fellow American anymore,” Mr. O’Rourke declared. Had Mr. Castro overreached in so personally going after one of the party’s most popular figures? Would there be backlash? Plus, it was not clear about whether Mr. Castro was even correct in his attack. Biden supporters said he was wrong; Castro aides litigated whether one could “automatically buy in” to programs, as Mr. Biden said.
The crowd gave him one of the loudest cheers of the night. The fact that Mr. Castro repeatedly challenged Mr. Biden throughout the night only intensified his attempted takedown of the former vice president. “I’m fulfilling the legacy of Barack Obama and you’re not,” Mr. Castro said at another point.
Ms. Klobuchar wouldn’t endorse a mandatory buybacks of assault-style rifles, instead praising the various gun control proposals backed by all of the Democratic presidential candidates. “That,” Mr. Biden shot back, “would be a surprise to him.”
“I personally think we should start with a voluntary buyback program,” she said. Beto O’Rourke, the one candidate whose entry and brief rise elicited the most mockery and jealousy among rival campaigns, became a figure of admiration at Thursday’s debate, following his response to the mass shooting that killed 22 people at a Wal-Mart in his hometown El Paso.
Mr. Booker was less laudatory of Mr. O’Rourke, as he said communities like his own have long been plagued by gun violence. “The way he handled what happened in his hometown is meaningful,” said Mr. Biden, after seemingly forgetting Mr. O’Rourke’s surname.
“I’m sorry that it had to take issues coming to my neighborhood or personally affecting Beto to make us demand change,” Mr. Booker said. “Beto, God love you for standing so courageously in the midst of that tragedy,” Ms. Harris said.
Mr. Sanders was asked, as he has been before, about how his brand of democratic socialism compares to “the ones being imposed in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua,” as Mr. Ramos put it. “I so appreciate what the congressman’s been doing,” Ms. Klobuchar said, before she offered a disagreement with his proposal to require owners of assault-style weapons to sell them to the government.
Mr. Sanders, as he has done before, rejected the framing. The El Paso shooting certainly changed the stature of Mr. O’Rourke, who took a two-week break from the campaign trail. The former congressman has since shifted his campaign to adopt more a confrontational stance against racism and gun violence.
“I’ll tell you what I believe in terms of democratic socialism. I agree with goes on in Canada and Scandinavia,” said, saying he was for universal health care, paid leave and living wages, and then inveighed against the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few billionaires. “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15,” he said. His campaign quickly tweeted the quip.
Mr. Sanders was also asked why he does not call Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro a “dictator.” But the praise being heaped upon Mr. O’Rourke is also indicative of how far he has fallen since his March campaign launch as a presumptive front-runner on the cover of Vanity Fair. Now languishing at around 1 percent to 2 percent in most polls, he’s not seen as a threat by the others.
“Anybody that does what Maduro does is a vicious tyrant. What we need now is international and regional cooperation for free elections in Venezuela to the people of that country can create their own future,” Mr. Sanders said. Isabella Grullón Paz contributed reporting.
Castro came next. “I’ll call Maduro a dictator,” he said. “Because he is a dictator.”
Ms. Klobuchar and Ms. Harris got tough questions about their records as prosecutors not being sufficiently progressive — and both largely dodged the specifics in responding.
“That’s not my record,” Ms. Klobuchar said when told that the A.C.L.U. was sour about her record responding to police shootings of black men when she was the district attorney in Minneapolis.
“What changes did we make?” she said. “Go after white collar crimes in a big way. Diversity in office in a big way. Work with the Innocence Project to make sure we do much better with eyewitness I.D.”
Ms. Harris said she “glad you asked me this question,” though mostly avoided answering it, claiming “many distortions” of her record.
Ultimately, she took some ownership of that record. “Was I able to get enough done? Absolutely not,” Ms. Harris said, pitching her new criminal justice plan as ambitious going forward.
After Ms. Klobuchar and Ms. Harris spoke, Mr. Biden made sure to note he became a public defender, leaving unsaid the contrast with the other prosecutors onstage.
Jonathan Martin and Astead W. Herndon contributed reporting from Houston.