For the second night in a row there was a Democratic primary debate on Thursday, this time featuring another 10 candidates, and for the most part it consisted of the kind of loony left crazy talk that might yet get President Donald Trump reelected. We hate to say it, but here we are.
There are so many Democrats who think they have a shot at beating Trump that they had to divide the field into two 10-person debates, with another four or five or six or so contenders left out altogether, and once again the candidates were given a mere 60 seconds to explain how they planned to solve such complicated problems as illegal immigration and America’s imperfect health care system and its ongoing racial tensions. No one wound up speaking for more than a cumulative six minutes during the debate, which made it hard for anyone to stand out in the crowded field, but we’re inclined to believe the conventional wisdom of all the pundits that California Sen. Kamala Harris got the best of it.
Unlike on Wednesday night the National Broadcasting Company didn’t have any embarrassing technical difficulties to delay the debate, but it started with a cacophony of most of the candidates trying to out shout one another, which the moderators were unable to contain. It ended with Harris raising her well-toned arms and saying “Hey, guys, you know what? America does not want to witness a food fight, they want to know how we are going to put food on their tables.” After that, she seemed to command the stage, for better and worse, as far as we’re concerned.
According to all the polls the front-runner in the race is former Delaware Senator and Vice President Joe Biden, followed closely by the self-proclaimed socialist and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and then Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who didn’t make much of her time on stage during Wednesday’s debate, but neither candidate fared particularly well.
Biden didn’t make any of his usual gaffes that can be endlessly replayed on cable news, but neither did he have the bright shining moment that can be endlessly replayed, and he took a lot of flak from pretty much everyone. Some Democrat we can’t quite name started it off by recalling the time he heard Biden give a speech some 30 years ago about passing the torch of Democratic leadership to a younger generation, Biden had a pretty good response about he’s still carrying that torch, but he’s even older than Trump and looked it. On the race question that always preoccupies Democrats he was criticized for recently saying that he once worked segregationist Democrats to get some non-racist legislation passed, which is offensive to contemporary Democratic sensibilities and yet another reminder of how very old he is. Harris also criticized Biden for his stand against busing schoolchildren to achieve desegregation, which is an issue from way back when we were in elementary and junior high school, and although we then agreed completely with the stand Biden took and still do we figure that the relative youngsters who will make up most of the Democratic primary electorate don’t know much about history and their exquisitely sensitive racial sensibilities will be offended.
Most of the field also took aim at Biden for being in on President Barack Obama’s supposedly harsh immigration policies, which surely sounded weird to any Republican ears that happened to be tuned in. Trump likes to blame Obama for the harsh family separation and detention policies he’s controversially imposed, but he also likes to claim that he’s saved us from Obama’s America-hating policy of opening America’s borders to the gang-banging rapists and drug dealers that were flowing into the country. If facts still matter Obama set a record for deportations during his two terms, which was controversial among Democrats even though it prioritized deportations of the gang-banging rapists and drug dealers who were undeniably out there, but Biden somehow had a hard time defending such a sensible policy.
Sanders didn’t commit any endlessly re-playable gaffes, either, at least not if you’re the sort of loony left die-hard supporter who voted for him last time around, but neither did he have his breakout moment, and he didn’t take much flak from the rest of the field. Most of the candidates were trying go even further left in promising free medical care for citizens and non-citizens alike, as well as free college educations and guaranteed incomes and free this and free that, and they all seemed to believe it could be done without adding to our current trillion dollar deficits or 20-trillion-plus national debt. This is all loony left crazy talk, of course, and just the sort of thing that can get Trump reelected, despite the trillion dollar deficits he’s been racking up in what he brags is the best economy ever.
To our eyes and ears the sanest person on the stage was former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, but we’re still registered Republicans and our kooky Democratic friends probably won’t take our advice when they cast their votes in next year’s Kansas primaries. Hickenlooper much endeared himself too ourselves when he got booed off the stage at a California party meeting by stating the obvious truth that kicking millions of Americans off their private insurance plans is bad policy and even worse politics, and he was met with icy silence on Thursday when he quite rightly said that if the Democratic doesn’t explicitly reject the socialist label Trump would be able tar them with it, which we heartily agreed with.
By most accounts Hickenlooper presided over good times in Colorado for two terms, even if the fact-checkers say he slightly overstates how good, and we hope he somehow sticks around in the Democratic race. He’s a boringly straight white male who’s endearingly lacking in charisma, given how disastrous the past two terms of charismatic presidents have been, and by current Democratic standards he seems quite tolerable. He made a fortune brewing beer, making him the first brewer since the great Samuel Adams of Massachusetts to be a governor of state, which we also find endearing, and he was governor when Colorado legalized marijuana, which is fine by us and should endear him to much of the Democratic party’s primary electorate.
In the first debate we found both Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar relatively sane and centrist by current Democratic standards, and there’s still a chance the Democrats won’t go so far to the loony left that they won’t wind up losing yet another election to the likes of Trump. As much as we hated Obama he lately doesn’t seem so bad, and for now neither does Biden. Trump and the Republicans are already calling Biden “Creepy Joe” because of his unsettling habit of rubbing women’s shoulders and sniffing their hair, but he hasn’t yet been caught bragging about any woman by the pussy. and at our age we find his old school approach to politics slightly reassuring.
That Harris woman is both a Californian and too far left for our pre-Trump Kansas Republican tastes, but she’s also a former California Attorney General who locked up and deported a lot of gang-banging rapist and drug-dealing illegal immigrants, and she seems relatively sane and centrist by current Democratic standards. She’s also a woman and multi-racial, so the Democrats will probably cut her some slack for her relative sanity and centrism, and we’ve noticed that in every interview she’s more well-spoken and fact-based than Trump, no matter what loony left rhetoric she’s spewing.
Trump is currently off to a G-20 summit where he’s insulting our allies and praising the world’s dictators, but he should take note that there’s still a chance the damned Democrats won’t blow the next election.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 