A6 The Nation The Boston Globe FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2019
the taxes of middle-income
Americans would go up under
her proposal, she declined to
respond directly.
In a tart exchange that chan-
neled their profound philo-
sophical differences, Sanders
held up Canada as a country
that provided universal cover-
age for a lower total cost,
prompting Biden to jump in:
“This is America.”
Sanders fired back: “Ameri-
cans don’t want to pay twice as
much as other countries.”
At one point, Biden called
Sanders a ‘‘socialist,’’ and ques-
tioned the amount of time it
would take to pass his more far-
reaching plan. ‘‘Do something
now!’’ Biden shouted.
The debate quickly devel-
oped as a virtual battle over the
soul of the Democratic Party, in-
cluding key questions of wheth-
er the party should pursue poli-
cies of sweeping change or a
more incremental return to
normalcy in the wake of
Trump.
Sanders and Warren largely
joined forces to spar with Biden
early in the race, casting their
plans as more properly suited
to the major problems of the
day.
The remaining field of can-
didates arrayed themselves
around the same philosophical
dividing line, most of them
aligning more closely with
Biden. And for the first time in
this primary race, a handful of
the trailing contenders sharp-
ened their attacks.
Senator Amy Klobuchar of
Minnesota derided Sanders’
single-payer bill as a “bad idea,”
while Mayor Pete Buttigieg of
South Bend, Ind., accused
Sanders and Warren of seeking
to take away choice from con-
sumers.
“I trust the American people
to make the right choice for
them,” Buttigieg said. “Why
don’t you?”
But it was a harshly conten-
tious clash between Biden and
Julián Castro, the former feder-
al housing secretary, that had
the potential to stand out the
most from the early exchanges
of the evening, at least in terms
of political theatrics. Seizing on
uDEBATE
Continued from Page A
a moment in which Biden ap-
peared to reverse his own de-
scription of his health care pro-
posals, Castro questioned
Biden’s memory — a charged
subject for the 76-year-old
Democratic front-runner.
“Are you forgetting already
what you said two minutes
ago?” Castro said, prodding in-
sistently before boasting, “I’m
fulfilling the legacy of Barack
Obama and you’re not.”
Biden shot back: “That
would be a surprise to him.”
As the bickering grew more
intense, Buttigieg interjected
that voters would not like the
attacks and attempts to “score
points,” which he said prompt-
ed only more derision.
“That’s called a Democratic
primary election,” Castro inter-
jected. “This is what we’re here
for.”
Trying to stay above the fray
was the candidate who un-
leashed one of the race’s tough-
est attacks at the first debate,
Senator Kamala Harris of Cali-
fornia. Harris used her opening
statement to speak directly to,
and criticize, Trump and during
the health care contretemps la-
mented that “not once have wetalked about Donald Trump.”
The debate was an opportu-
nity for Buttigieg to bring up
his proposal to seek an authori-
zation for the use of military
force with a built-in three-year
sunset that Congress would be
required to renew.
‘‘We have got to put an end
to endless war,’’ Buttigieg said.
Buttigieg also said that
Trump treats ‘‘troops as props,
or worse, tools for his own en-
richment.’’ That final dig was
an allusion to the Trump ad-
ministration’s rerouting of US
military personnel to overnight
stays at his Trump Turnberry
golf resort in Scotland.
Thursday’s debate, the first
since July, came at a moment
when a race that once seemed
volatile had become remark-
ably stable. Over the summer
the field divided into two dis-
tinct classes, with Biden, Sand-
ers and Warren representing
the top tier both in national
and early-state polling.
While Biden remains the
front-runner in the Democratic
race, he has yet to produce the
kind of commanding debate
performance that might excite
undecided Democrats or put torest their unease about his
readiness for a contest with
Trump. Biden’s support has
held steady for the past few
months, hovering around 30
percent of primary voters, but
there is no indication he has
won over any skeptical voters
since entering the race in April.
After a disastrous first de-
bate in June, when Harris deliv-
ered a thumping denunciation
of his record on race, Biden ap-
peared somewhat more sure-
footed during a July debate in
Detroit. But he still struggled to
turn back sharp critiques of his
record from Harris and Senator
Cory Booker of New Jersey, or
to articulate a clear message for
his own candidacy besides re-
sisting the large-scale promises
of the left.
The most significant change
to the campaign over the course
of the summer has been War-
ren’s steady rise — and the im-
pact her surge has had on the
trailing candidates. After
months of training their fire at
Biden, a few of the Democratic
hopefuls have started to target
the Massachusetts senator, spe-
cifically her array of ambitious
policy proposals.Sanders is under political
pressure, too: With Warren
gaining strength and his own
poll numbers stalled, he cannot
afford to let her emerge as the
leading champion of their par-
ty’s populist left. Should a
Biden-Warren rivalry come to
dominate the next phase of the
race, Sanders could find him-
self frozen in third place.
For Booker, demonstrating a
sign of political life in Houston
was a necessity, because it
would be difficult for him to fi-
nance a full-fledged campaign
into next year if he did not
show growth in early-state poll-
ing.
While he has several en-
dorsements in both Iowa and
New Hampshire, he has sought
to straddle the mainstream and
progressive wings of the party
and has proved unable to break
through the din of a crowded
field.
Buttigieg, 38, has similarly
sought to avoid lining up with
either ideological bloc and has
not been able to sustain any
real growth in the polls with his
generational case. He is in no
danger of being unable to meet
a payroll, but he faces the spec-ter of being branded as a mere
donor candidate, beloved by
the party’s wealthy financiers
but with scant support from its
rank-and-file.
For Castro and former repre-
sentative Beto O’Rourke of Tex-
as, the debate offered at least a
symbolic home-field advantage.
The two Texans have held up
their home state as something
of a rationale for their cam-
paigns: They have both pre-
sented themselves as experts on
the culture of America’s border
region and called for liberaliz-
ing the country’s immigration
laws, with Castro positioned on
the left flank of the field.
After a white supremacist
gunman carried out a massacre
in his hometown, El Paso, last
month, O’Rourke reoriented
his campaign to focus on crack-
ing down on gun violence and
battling racism. He has pushed
the Democratic debate leftward
on the issue of gun control with
his call to require the owners of
assault-style weapons to sell
them to the government.
In the early going of the de-
bate, O'Rourke claimed the per-
petrator of last month’s mass
shooting in El Paso was ‘‘in-
spired to kill by our president.’’
Trump campaign communi-
cations director Tim Murtaugh
replied on Twitter that
O'Rourke was ‘‘as desperate as
he can be.’’
O’Rourke won a booming
ovation from the Democratic
audience when he was asked
whether he would try to confis-
cate some weapons.
“Hell, yes, we’re going to
take your AR-15, your AK-47,”
he said. “We’re not going to al-
low it to be used against fellow
Americans anymore.”
The least-predictable figure
onstage was perhaps Andrew
Yang, the former technology ex-
ecutive who has promised to es-
tablish a new government ben-
efit to give every citizen $1,
per month.
Whether his message of
alarm about the automation of
American jobs can resonate
more widely remains to be
seen.Material from the Washington
Post and the Associated Press
was used in this report.But Warren hardly took the
bait.
Rather than hitting back di-
rectly at Biden, she launched
into a spirited defense of Sand-
ers’ plan. The answer set the
tone for a night in which it was
Warren, the ascendant Demo-
crat, who sought to hover above
the fray, and at times out of the
spotlight, crisply defending her
ideas while Biden tangled with
his rivals, haltingly defending
his own record and seeking to
raise questions about whether
theirs were realistic.
For Warren, the debate was a
new test at the end of a long,
bright summer in which her
most significant opponents
largely refrained from trying to
puncture her grand vision for
change — and the debate
showed she plans to try to
stay above the fray as long as she
can.
It was the third debate of the
presidential primary and the
first time the stage was limited
to only 10 candidates. But that
hardly made the debate any less
feisty or chaotic than the previ-
ous two rounds, which left po-
litical observers and voters wor-
ried that intraparty acrimony
could distract Democrats from
their ultimate goal of defeating
President Trump.
But Biden, who has led the
polls since he entered the race
in April, made for a more be-
guiling target to the other can-
didates onstage than Warren,
who stayed quiet as they laid in-
to him for his record and even
his age. It was a signal that the
policy-focused strategy that has
buoyed her presidential cam-
paign is unlikely to change, and
that she is betting she can let
other candidates fight it out
while she sells her ideas.
As the debate unfolded over
nearly three hours, she weighed
uANALYSIS
Continued from Page A
in clearly as the winnowed field
presented a concentrated clash
over the fundamental question
in the Democratic primary: Do
voters want a candidate who is
offering to right the ship and
“restore” the nation after four
years of Trump, as Biden does,
or someone pushing for a more
fundamental transformation of
American society?
Warren used her time to ar-
gue for that transformation,
and even showed rare daylight
between herself and Sanders
when she called for the elimina-
tion of the Senate filibuster in
an effort to pass new gun con-
trol laws.
“Until we attack the system-
ic problems, we can’t get gun
reform in this country,” Warren
said, moments before Sanders
said he did not support elimi-
nating the filibuster.
She stayed quiet as the de-
bate about health care turned
messy, leaving Biden and other
candidates shouting over each
other and risked drowning out
the vice president’s message of
a moderate expansion of the
health care system.
He sought to attack Sanders
— “For a socialist, you’ve got a
lot more faith in corporate
America than I do,” Biden said
— and said the worst diseases,
like cancer, were personal to
him. Moments later, former
Housing and Urban Develop-
ment secretary Julian Castro
went on the attack, accusing
him of forgetting a detail about
how people would get enrolled
in his plan.
“Are you forgetting what you
just said onstage two minutes
ago?” Castro said, an apparent
dig at Biden’s advanced age —
he is 76 — and well-document-
ed tendency to misspeak and
mix up his words. The com-
ment drew some boos from the
audience.
But Warren’s strategy of fo-cusing solely on her ideas, and
not engaging with other candi-
dates, comes with a risk. She
dodged questions about wheth-
er Medicare for All would re-
quire raising taxes on the mid-
dle class — a question Sanders
has previously answered in the
affirmative — and her caution
onstage limited her speaking
time, keeping her out of the
spotlight as other candidates
tried to grab the moment for
themselves.
California Senator Kamala
Harris, for example, used the
fighting that erupted around
her as an opportunity to cast
herself as a unifying candidate
who could simply beat Trump.
As her rivals bickered over their
personal flavors of health care
reform, Harris interjected, try-
ing to put the focus back on
Trump.
“This discussion has given
the American people a head-
ache,” she said. “But let’s focus
on the end goal. If we don’t get
Donald Trump out of office he’s
going to get rid of all of it.”
Yet Warren seemed to bene-
fit by staying quiet, particularly
in moments when Biden strug-
gled to make his case — an oc-
currence that underscored the
delicate nature of his front-run-
ner status, and the hunger for
other candidates to capitalize
on his implosion if it comes.
At one point, for example,
Biden was asked about a state-
ment he made 40 years ago
about reparations for slavery.
At the time he said, “I’ll be
damned if I feel responsible to
pay for what happened 300
years ago.”
In a rambling answer, the
former vice president began to
speak about his work to curb
institutional segregation, but
ended by talking about a record
player, saying people should
have it on at night so poor chil-
dren can learn new words.“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 school, a very
poor background will hear 4
million words fewer spoken by
the time we get there,” Biden
said.
When the moderators tried
to cut him off, Biden interrupt-
ed them. “I’m going to go like
the rest of them do — twice
over,” he said.
Still, the debate offered pos-
sible previews of future lines of
attack against Warren, particu-
larly as other moderate candi-
dates tried subtly to suggest
that her ideas were too liberal.
“You’re going to hear a lot of
ideas up here,” said Minnesota
Senator Amy Klobuchar, in
what may have been a veiled
reference to Warren and Sand-
ers’ big ideas. “Some will be
great. But if you see that some
of them seem a little off-track,
I’ve got a better way.”
As Warren’s stock rises, she
may face more scrutiny for con-
troversial ideas — like when she
told the debate moderator she
was willing to pull troops out of
Afghanistan without a deal.
“What we are doing right
now in Afghanistan is not help-
ing the safety and security of
the United States and it’s not
helping the safety and security
of the world, it’s not helping the
safety and security of Afghani-
stan,” she said, evoking her
three brothers’ military service.
“We cannot ask our military
to keep solving problems that
cannot be solved militarily,” she
said.Laura Krantz of the Globe staff
contributed to this report. Jess
Bidgood can be reached at
[email protected].
Follow her on
Twitter@jessbidgoodCAMPAIGN 2020
Togetheronstage,toptierissharplydivided
FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Thursday night’s debate was the first where all the Democratic contenders fit on one stage.ForWarren,anighttochooseherbattles EX-VICEPRESIDENTJOEBIDEN Grade:B+
In the grand scheme of things, this debate won’t matter much.
But for Biden, it was a big night. He needed to stop the bleeding
and to show some fight. He did both. Since he is the front-run-
ner, there will be a focus on some of the weirder moments. But
that is what happens to a front-runner — and he established
that’s what he is right now.SENATORELIZABETHWARREN Grade:B
Warren has had the most consistent debate performances over
the three rounds. Given her momentum, you can imagine that
she had the words “do no harm” written on her hand. And she
did no harm. She also didn’t do a lot to help herself, but that’s
just fine.SENATORBERNIESANDERS Grade:B
The evening was being framed as a Biden versus Warren event,
which raised the question: Will Sanders be left out? He wasn’t.
But stylistically, while Sanders is normally grumpy, he appeared
almost downright angry. His place in the top tier is firm, but
hard to see how he won any new converts.SENATORKAMALAHARRIS Grade:C+
Harris was reportedly getting a lot of pressure from her donors
to have a breakout performance in this debate. She did not. She
did have some good practiced quips. That said, she established
she is the top candidate in the second tier and could one day
join the top tier.SENATORCORYBOOKER Grade:C
Booker didn’t do anything wrong in this debate. But he just put
more pressure on having a great moment in the next debate,
which might be do or die.MAYORPETEBUTTIGIEG Grade:C
Like Booker, he didn’t do anything wrong, but he also didn’t do
anything right. The Buttigieg bubble has been fading for a while
and he did nothing to stop the fading.JULIÁNCASTRO Grade:C-
Castro’s performance will be remembered almost entirely for
his attacks on Biden. Did it work? Not really. But he is in last
place on the stage and needed to try something. Did he help his
campaign? No. Did he get a higher grade for style? Sure.BETOO’ROURKE Grade:C-
When the spotlight was on guns, O’Rourke had a good moment
— “Hell yes! We’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47!”
However, the kudos he got from other candidates signaled that
they don’t see him as a threat. Other than the discussion of gun
control, he was irrelevant.SENATORAMYKLOBUCHAR Grade:D+
Klobuchar has positioned herself as the other moderate besides
Biden — but she didn’t really stand out as the other moderate,
but rather as the debate’s afterthought.ANDREWYANG Grade:D
This could have been a breakout debate for Yang. It wasn’t. He
started out Oprah-style: offering 10 people $1,000 a month. It
won’t win him the presidency.
JAMES PINDELLWinners and losers