I have been thinking about my
years as an op-ed writer in terms of freedom of the press. I had so much
freedom to write about what I wanted. But publishing in the newspaper did
entail some restrictions, most of which were not important, for example, I could
not use bad words.
Now that I write for online
readers, I realize some newfound freedom from the press. I have no restrictions
on length aside from your patience. I can use whatever words I want. Today I
take another liberty with my freedom – I send this a day late. Because the
Democratic debate is on Tuesday, I want to include it in this column.
The last debate in Nevada
made a stronger impression on me than most of the others, because of the highly
critical comments all around. The metaphor of a circular firing squad could
become accurate, if these few Democrats work so hard at tearing the others down
that they collectively make all of them unelectable. I had a notion about who
had said what and what that mattered, but I wanted to see what really happened
by reading the transcript:
I think anyone watching the
debate would have been struck by the exchange between Elizabeth Warren and
Michael Bloomberg in the first minutes. Warren made a statement for the ages:
“I’d like to talk about who we’re running against. A billionaire who calls
women fat broads and horse faced lesbians. And no, I’m not talking about Donald
Trump, I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg. Democrats are not going to win if we
have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women
and of supporting racist policies like redlining and stop-and-frisk. Look, I’ll
support whoever the Democratic nominee is, but understand this, Democrats take
a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another.”
That may be what is
remembered, but I think Bloomberg said something even more important about
Bernie Sanders first: “I don’t think there’s any chance of the Senator beating
President Trump. You don’t start out by saying, “I’ve got 160 million people,
I’m going to take away the insurance plan that they love.” That’s just not a
ways that you go and start building the coalition that the Sanders’ camp thinks
that they can do. I don’t think there’s any chance whatsoever, and if he goes
and is the candidate, we will have Donald Trump for another four years and we
can’t stand that.”
This was not tit for tat.
Bloomberg dismissed Sanders’ candidacy as a failure, and gave no indication he
would support it. Bernie is a loser. The people who vote for Sanders now, which
so far has been the plurality in 3 primary states, are deluded or worse.
Warren was not nice, but she
was a making much more reasoned and fact-based prediction about the campaign,
if Bloomberg were the nominee. Nevertheless, she said she would support
“whoever the Democratic nominee is.” The difference is that Bloomberg did
creepy things he has to explain and Bernie is winning Democratic votes.
Pete Buttigieg was desperate,
I thought, to knock off the front runner Sanders and the dangerous rival for
moderate Democrats Bloomberg. So he lumped them together as dangerous: “we’ve
got to wake up as a party. We could wake up two weeks from today, the day after
super Tuesday, and the only candidates left standing will be Bernie Sanders and
Mike Bloomberg, the two most polarizing figures on this stage. And most
Americans don’t see where they fit, if they’ve got to choose between a
socialist who thinks that capitalism is the root of all evil and a billionaire
who thinks that money ought to be the root of all power. Let’s put forward
somebody who actually lives and works in a middle-class neighborhood, in an
industrial Midwestern city. Let’s put forward somebody who’s actually a
Democrat. Look, we shouldn’t have to choose between one candidate who wants to
burn this party down and another candidate who wants to buy this party out. We
can do better.”
Again the words about Sanders
are important: he will burn the party down; he’s a socialist, not a democratic
socialist; he is on a par with Bloomberg. The latest polls
have Sanders in the lead in New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania,
California, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Illinois. He is tied with Biden
in Texas, and comes second to Biden in South Carolina, and third behind Biden
and Bloomberg in Florida.
In nearly all these states,
Buttigieg is in 4th or 5th place. In Midwestern states,
who might look favorably on “somebody who actually lives and works in an
industrial Midwestern city”, Buttigieg comes in 5th in Pennsylvania,
Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
The Nevada debate made me
uncomfortable. The South Carolina debate was hard for me to watch. The danger
that has accompanied the months of campaigning and debates so far, that these
varied and talented Democrats would kill each other off, was apparent.
The arguments of Klobuchar
and Buttigieg, that unity is most important for Democrats and the country, are
now a smokescreen for assertions that Bernie Sanders is too divisive, too
rigid, too far to the left, which alienates all non-Democrats and threatens 4
more years of Trump and loss of the House. They both expressed the certainty
that Bernie represents a danger to Democrats because of his policies.
the Economist/YouGov national
poll puts Buttigieg and Klobuchar 5th and 6th at 9% and
4%;
the Hill/HarrisX poll puts
them in 4th and 6th with 12% and 3%;
the CBS News/YouGov poll has
them in 5th and 6th at 10% and 5%.
In Minnesota, her home state
where she has won victories that she constantly talks about, Klobuchar is ahead
of Sanders only 29%-23%. Bernie’s “favorability rating” among Democrats is the highest, while Buttigieg and
Klobuchar occupy their usual places outside of the top four.
Divisive is the public
yelling that the leading Democratic vote-getter is “burning down the party”, by
candidates who are rejected by most Democrats. Their most important claim is nonsense: Sanders
beat Trump in the most recent poll by CBS/You Gov by a larger margin than
anyone else, and other national polls show similar results. He beats Trump by
the largest margin in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, those states at
the center of Democratic calculations.
The debate last night displayed rudeness, lack of discipline, hostility, and misleading
criticisms of fellow Democrats. Buttigieg couldn’t stop making wild predictions about chaos if Sanders is nominated: “I mean, look, if you think the
last four years has been chaotic, divisive, toxic, exhausting, imagine spending
the better part of 2020 with Bernie Sanders vs. Donald Trump. Think about what
that will be like for this country.”
The nastiest lightly veiled
implication by Buttigieg and Klobuchar was that Bernie “had shown an
inexplicable, suspicious softness toward authoritarian regimes around the
world”, as NY times columnist Frank Bruni says. Here is the context. All the
moderate candidates position themselves as descendants of Obama. An article in
the New York Intelligencer shows that Obama praised the Cuban educational
system, that every President has noted actual good achievements in
authoritarian nations, and that some, including Trump, have praised the worst
dictators in general terms. The article concludes that examining “the senator’s
actual governing record on civil liberties and political freedom” brings him
again to the fore.
Perhaps I’ll discuss Joe
Biden and Elizabeth Warren later. Tom Steyer has no chance, but he is the most
modest and least hostile of the candidates. Bloomberg makes it clear that he
thinks Bernie is a sure loser to Trump, that he will be a disaster for the
Democratic party. He needs to prove that he is really a Democrat, and he hates
Bernie’s progressive policies. He has never made the call for unity among
Democrats a signature position, except unity behind himself. So it’s not
surprising that he attacks the obvious front-runner.
Buttigieg and Klobuchar are
desperate. They have been campaigning hard for nearly a year and are mired at
the bottom of those left in the race. They had virtually no appeal for black
and Latino voters in December or in
January. Polls
in the many states that vote on Super Tuesday,
which will probably decide the overall delegate winner, show Buttigieg and
Klobuchar outside of the top 2 everywhere, outside of the top 4 in most states,
except for Klobuchar’s lead in her home state.
Claims that Bernie Sanders is
a bad Democrat and a sure loser disdains the Democratic voting public, which
puts him in the lead everywhere. These white candidates with only white support
are telling voters of color that they don’t know what they are doing. I don’t
think it is possible that Klobuchar and Buttigieg would rather have 4 more
years of Trump than see Bernie leading the country. But their dishonest attacks
on a likely nominee may make the difference in a close race.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville
February 26, 2020
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