The Daily - A Guide to the Democratic Debates

Episode Date: June 26, 2019

Over the next two days, 20 Democrats will take the stage for the first debates of the 2020 presidential race. We look at the competing visions for America they’ll be fighting over this week, and throughout the campaign. Guest: Alexander Burns, who covers national politics for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: Does anyone deserve to have a billion dollars? How many hours of sleep do you get? The Times asked 21 Democratic presidential candidates the same set of questions. Here’s what they said, and here are some takeaways.For the candidates, these early debates may represent the first, best — and, in some cases, only — opportunity to stand out from competitors and build national momentum in the primary. Here’s how they’re preparing.Senator Elizabeth Warren is the only candidate on the first night who is polling in double digits, but there are plenty of story lines and political dynamics to watch for.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. Over the next two days, 20 Democratic candidates for president will take the stage for the first time in the 2020 campaign. My colleague Alex Burns, on the two competing visions for America they'll be fighting over, this week and throughout the election. It's Wednesday, June 26th. Alex, you've been thinking a lot about the democratic field ahead of these debates.

Tell me exactly what you've been thinking about. You know, there's one moment over the last few weeks that has really stuck in my mind. Last week at a fundraiser with a bunch of wealthy donors in New York, Joe Biden told this story about having worked with segregationist senators in the Senate. It really blew up in the race. Speaking at a fundraiser in New York City Tuesday night, Biden told the crowd this. I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland. He never called me boy. He always called me son. Herman Talbage, one of the meanest guys I ever knew. Well, guess what? At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn't agree on much of anything, but we got things done. He took all kinds of heat from his

rivals like Cory Booker. I heard from many, many African Americans who found the comments hurtful. Kamala Harris. To coddle the reputations of segregationists, of people who, if they had their way, I would literally not be standing here as a member of the United States Senate, is, I think, it's just, it's misinformed and it's wrong. For having sort of spoken with nostalgia about the old days of the Senate

and the racial implications of that. But when I read the accounts of that fundraiser, a different moment really stood out to me that I would have expected to blow up a little bit more. There was a direct quote in his riff that night where he told this room of donors that under his presidency, no one standard

of living will change. Nothing would fundamentally change. You could fix the economy without demonizing the rich, without doing too much to disrupt the lives of the rich. That seemed like a really stark statement in the context of this Democratic primary. And what specifically about that remark stood out to you? It stood out to me as such an important organizing statement of the Biden candidacy. This idea that you can do what needs to be done without blowing up the system, without taking a hatchet to the economic structure of the country. We tend to think about the divisions within the Democratic Party, the divisions we're going to see play out on the debate stages this week and next month,

as ideological, as being about the left versus the center. But in so many ways, it's about something even more basic, which is whether you think the system can be made to work in more or less the form it currently exists or whether you need to blow it up. And in that moment, Joe Biden said. You work within the system. I'm not going to blow it up. And in that moment, Joe Biden said, You work within the system. I'm not going to blow it up.

So this way of thinking about it, Alex, kind of feels like a do-over of 2016. So are you saying that this is just kind of a repeat of that Democratic primary? In some ways. You know, last time the Democrats had this really stark choice in their primary. Republicans had a stark choice in theirs between institutionalist, moderate candidates like Hillary Clinton. Broad-based, inclusive growth is what we need in America. And Jeb Bush on the Republican side. There's not a reason in the world why we cannot grow at a rate of 4 percent a year.

And candidates who wanted to really swing an axe at the system. Congress does not regulate Wall Street. Wall Street regulates Congress. And we have got to break off these banks. Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Party and, of course, Donald Trump for the Republicans. The economy is rigged. The banking system is rigged. There's a lot of things that are rigged

in this world of ours. The Republicans chose their pitch for a candidate. Democrats did not. And what we saw in the general election was that there was enough of a constituency that was angry enough, disaffected enough, frustrated enough with the system as it currently exists that the pitchfork guy won.

Right. There was a lot of speculation right afterward that maybe Bernie Sanders, the Democratic pitchfork candidate, would have been a stronger nominee once it became clear how much frustration and grievance and blow up the system had driven the general election. In retrospect, looking at 2016, feel an enormous sense of remorse or frustration that Hillary Clinton was not able to speak to that voter anger and that the party put forward a candidate who was so intimately tied to the current political system and the Washington establishment. So now the Democrats have to decide once again which type of these candidates to run. Knowing that, why wouldn't they just go with a Bernie Sanders type or literally with Sanders this time? Well, they may well go with Bernie Sanders or a Bernie Sanders type of candidate, but the pool of voters that's available to Democrats in a general election is not the same

as it was in 2016. For those working class white voters, especially in the Midwest, who voted Democratic historically and turned to President Trump in 2016, many of them don't have a reason to get off the Trump train just yet. The president has spoken to their anger about trade, anger about immigration and economic dislocation, their racial anxieties, all manner of frustrations and grievances. all manner of frustrations and grievances. When you talk to voters in that part of the country who supported President Trump, you will often hear that they may or may not like all the specifics of his record in government, but they still believe he's an outsider. They still believe he's fighting for them.

It's not uniformly true, but that pool of voters that may have been open to a Bernie Sanders-type candidate in 2016 may or may not be available to a left-wing pitchfork candidate next year. They may be firmly entrenched with President Trump. That's right. On the other hand, there are big chunks of the electorate that used to vote reliably Republican, educated suburban voters, especially more educated and affluent women who would have voted reliably Republican in every

previous election and who rejected Hillary Clinton as an option, who now seem to be up for grabs on the other side. So we're looking at a different set of voters that is disaffected, frustrated with the way Washington is working, upset with the president, and really undecided about what they'll do in 2020. So it's the same question that we were asking in 2016. It's just that the country, the electorate, has changed in the two years since. And those frustrated voters who will decide the election this time, they are different. They are. And Democrats are at a crossroads right now.

And they have to decide whether the right way to speak to those voters is to talk about restoring normalcy and stability, getting rid of President Trump and bringing back some semblance of the government that we all know and love, or whether they feel like they need to talk to those voters and really the whole electorate about systemic change and draining the swamp and fundamentally restructuring the way government and the economy work. In other words, was Donald Trump the problem or was the system that got him elected the problem? That's right. If you go candidate by candidate in this democratic field and put them through exactly the question you just asked,

that's where you start to separate out the folks who believe that fundamentally Trump as an individual, as a leader, is an anomaly and that once you get rid of him, the country can get pretty quickly to solving its problems within the parameters of the system that currently exists versus the candidates who see Trump as merely a symptom of much more profound problems that must be dealt with in much more drastic ways. Right. And if you believe the latter, that the system must be disrupted, then the Democrats need essentially a mirror image of Trump, a progressive figure who represents blowing up the system. If you believe the former, then you're looking for essentially the inverse of Trump, former, then you're looking for essentially the inverse of Trump, a moderate conciliatory figure who represents the party's values but doesn't want such significant change.

You're essentially looking for Joe Biden in that case, right? A moderate incrementalist candidate who is not going to pretend that he wants to take a chainsaw to Washington. He is a guy who knows Washington and actually likes Washington and thinks that if you just sent him into a room with the Republicans, he would get better results than if you elected a Democratic president who would rail against the Congress and rail against the Senate and rail against Wall Street. candidates who don't really share anything with Donald Trump in terms of their policies or their cultural worldview or their personal manner, but in terms of their attitude towards Washington and what the next president needs to do to the government, to the economy, have a lot more in common with Donald Trump than they have in common with Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton. We need fundamental change. We need a political revolution. Our government systematically favors the rich over the poor, the donor class over the working class,

the well-connected over the disconnected. Things are changing tectonically in our country, and we can't just keep doing what we've been doing. We can't nibble around the edges of a system that no longer works. And so perhaps, whereas before we might have thought that the difference between Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren was not all that significant, now with this way of looking at it, that difference is pretty significant. Biden's agenda so far is the agenda that he could have run on for president in 2016. Folks, I know I'm called middle class, Joe. I'm always talking about middle class. Well, I'll tell you what. With a growing middle class, we have economic, political, and social stability.

It sounds like somebody who's talking about completing the unfinished business of the Obama administration, pushing the climate change policies of that White House even further. We need to be investing in clean energy innovation, building clean energy infrastructure for a nationwide network of charging stations all across America. Implementing a comprehensive immigration reform deal, expanding health care through a version of a public option, but not discarding the private health insurance system entirely. You all should have a choice to be able to buy into a public option plan for Medicare. Your choice. And if the insurance company isn't doing the right thing by you, you should have another choice. His theory of the case is that if Joe Biden had run on that

platform three years ago, he would have beaten Donald Trump because he's a better candidate than Hillary Clinton. And he would have been more empathetic and spoken more directly to the group of voters who felt so disaffected. What I want to see us do is make big structural change. Elizabeth Warren goes from event to event talking about her exact words are big structural change. Big structural change. Big structural change. It's the exact opposite of Joe Biden's message, and it's an entirely different bet on what the electorate might respond to. It's not trying to reassure people that everything will be OK again once Donald Trump is gone. It's talking about a much, much bigger disruption.

I wonder if you can give us specific examples of how similar ideologies here are totally different when we think about the approach. You have an idea like Warren's wealth tax, right, to tax all assets over $50 million held by private individuals. This is the ultra-rich. You're going to have to pay 2% a year of that amount over $50 million. That isn't just an incremental revenue raiser. It's designed to go at big fortunes and restrain them, right? Someone like Pete Buttigieg is probably somewhat more moderate overall than a Warren or certainly than a Sanders, but he is out there campaigning on the idea of adding six justices to the Supreme Court and changing the procedure by which people are seated on the Supreme Court in the first place.

A lot of people might assume that it's in the Constitution, for example, that we have nine justices. It's not, and the number of justices is fluctuating between six and ten. I think there are reforms that we could undertake that would make the Supreme Court less of an apocalyptic ideological battle every time that there's a nomination. That goes well beyond differences between liberals and moderates and goes at the larger question of big, durable political reform. So Alex, given that, what are we to make of these recent, admittedly early, but pretty consistent polls that have shown these Democratic candidates running head-to-head against Donald Trump? And in those polls, Joe Biden has been the clear favorite.

He's come out well ahead of Trump. So what does that tell us? Does it tell us that voters think that Trump is the problem rather than the system being the problem. It certainly tells us that a lot of voters find Joe Biden to be a reassuring figure and somebody who they would prefer to have as president than the current guy. That someone like Joe Biden doesn't necessarily need to be out there promising to overhaul Washington from top to bottom in order for a lot of Americans to see him as someone they would much prefer to have in the Oval Office. Whether they see Joe Biden's policy vision, whether they see his vision for how he would operate as president as genuinely inspiring is something that we will find out over the course of a long campaign.

What makes Democratic strategists feel good about Joe Biden is just this sense that he's a safe option that the entire country can pretty much embrace as an alternative to the president. And what makes Democratic strategists and activists anxious about Joe Biden is this concern that Hillary Clinton looked pretty safe to at this point in 2016. And got less and less safe along the way. That's right. We'll be right back. So Alex, what are you going to be looking for in the debates over the next couple of days in relation to all of this? Well, looking at the debate through this lens, I think we're going to be watching most of the candidates besides Joe Biden for signs that they can break through with a vision of what Washington and what the country would look like after four or eight years of them as president and just how different it would be from today. I think most Democratic primary voters know what Bernie Sanders wants to do as president. Many of them know what Elizabeth Warren would want to do as president. There is a range of other reformist outsider, I wouldn't quite say pitchfork candidates, but definitely candidates who are running against the system who have not necessarily articulated their vision in really clear terms for a national audience.

So does a Pete Buttigieg on the debate stage have an opportunity to present himself as an anti-Trump in a substantive way that gets some of his big ideas out there? that gets some of his big ideas out there. You know, for a smaller number of candidates, candidates who are kind of in the Biden mold, an Amy Klobuchar, a Michael Bennett, a John Hickenlooper, is there a chance in these debates to make the case for yourself as an incrementalist, responsible figure of stability where you're not just totally operating

in Joe Biden's shadow? And then, of course, for Biden himself, this debate is a really important test of whether he can lay out a vision for the country that Democratic primary voters hear and think, that's the country I want to live in. So far, his candidacy has been, to paraphrase Joe Biden himself, look, everywhere we turn, it's clear that Donald Trump is shredding what we most believe. Trump makes the wrong choices. Trump is tearing down the guardrails of democracy. A noun, a verb, and Donald Trump, right, that he has talked about himself as the electable guy who can beat the president next

fall. And for a lot of Democratic voters, that has been enough. But once he's on stage with a big group of people who have big ideas and big personalities and who are fundamentally likable to Democratic primary voters, Joe Biden's going to need to show that he can paint a picture that inspires his party's base. And how exactly will we know what we're seeing in these two debates? What would you hear from Biden and from the other candidates on that stage, on those stages, because there will be two, that would you hear from Biden and from the other candidates on that stage, on those stages, because there will be two, that would be important to you? Like, what particular words do you imagine listening for?

Well, for the candidates who are running as real change agents, as real disruptors, I would listen for language about it being insufficient just to defeat Donald Trump. I would listen for language about needing to fundamentally change Washington or fundamentally change the economy. I would be surprised if we didn't hear quite a bit of that, certainly from Warren, Buttigieg, Beto O'Rourke, and Cory Booker. Those are the candidates who have been out there the most in terms of using that vocabulary. On the other side of the race, I would listen for certainly Biden himself and then a number of other like-minded candidates to use language about restoring American leadership, restoring American values at home

and abroad, where you're talking about a vision for the next presidency that is less about restructuring the country than cleaning up a mess that they see President Trump as having created. Alex, thank you very much. Thank you. very much. Thank you. The Democratic Party will hold its first presidential primary debate tonight at 9 p.m., featuring 10 candidates, including Senators Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Amy Klobuchar. A second debate, featuring 10 more Democratic candidates, will be held on Thursday night, including former Vice President Joseph Biden,

Senator Bernie Sanders, and Senator Kamala Harris. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Former special counsel Robert Mueller, who has resisted commenting on his investigation, will publicly testify before two congressional committees next month. His testimony before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees could reshape the debate over the possibility of impeaching President Trump. Mueller agreed to testify after receiving a subpoena from the two committees.

And On Tuesday, in a speech from Tehran, Iran's leader, Hassan Rouhani, denounced President Trump as, quote, mentally crippled and called the administration's new sanctions against Iran's leaders outrageous and idiotic. In response, President Trump called Rouhani's remarks, quote, ignorant and insulting, and warned that any future Iranian attack on a U.S. target would result in obliteration for Iran. Finally, the Times reports that the Acting Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, John Sanders, will resign after two months in the job amid a growing outcry over the agency's treatment of detained children.

In the latest controversy for the agency, a group of lawyers documented a lack of showers, clean clothing, and sufficient food at a Texas patrol station used to house hundreds of migrant children. The agency has denied the poor conditions at the patrol station, but acknowledges it's been overwhelmed by the volume of children showing up at the border.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.