The Daily - The Democratic Debates

Episode Date: June 28, 2019

Twenty Democrats seeking their party’s presidential nomination have now made their case to American voters. We take a look at their visions for the future, the breakout performances and the state of the race. 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: Here are takeaways from the first night and the second night of the debates.See which candidates spoke the most on Wednesday and on Thursday.Read more of our 2020 election coverage.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, 20 Democratic candidates have now made their case to American voters. Alex Barnes on the differing visions for the future, the breakout performances, and where it leaves the race. It's Friday, June 28th. So, Alex Burns, it's 2.25 p.m. on Thursday. So we're talking in between the two sets of Democratic debates. Right. We're in this very long intermission in this sort of multi-part extravaganza.

We had 10 candidates last night. We're going to have 10 candidates tonight. They were sorted out more or less randomly by the Democratic National Committee. On the first night, the tone really set by the insurgent wing of the party embodied by Elizabeth Warren. For the second night, the tone very clearly going to be set by the more establishment, moderate, incrementalist wing of the party embodied in Joe Biden. Good evening, everyone. I'm Lester Holt, and welcome to the first Democratic debate in the 2020 race for president. Hi, I'm Savannah Guthrie, and tonight is our first— So, who was on stage on night number one, Wednesday night? Don't know. You're going to struggle to remember all the time, aren't you?

I certainly am. Look, the most prominent people were— Didn't you watch the debate? I did, man. It was two hours. So— Well, now it's time to find out. Tonight, round one, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker.

Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, big senators in this race, big figures in the party. You have Beto O'Rourke, former Texas Senate candidate, Julian Castro, former housing secretary, Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington State. Three current or former members of the House, Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, John Delaney of Maryland, Tim Ryan of Ohio, and then Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York. Good evening again, everyone. Welcome to the candidates and to our audience here in Miami. And how does this debate begin? And we'll start this evening with Senator Elizabeth Warren. Senator, good evening to you. Thank you. Well, it begins like so much else in this race, with Elizabeth Warren setting the tone,

setting the ideological stakes, setting the frame for the argument. What do you say to those who worry this kind of significant change could be risky to the economy? So I think of it this way. Who is this economy really working for? Right out of the gate, she is talking about big structural change in the country. It's doing great for giant drug companies. It's just not doing great for people who are trying to get a prescription filled. And denouncing basically the economic system and government as a whole as corrupt.

We need to call it out. We need to attack it head on. And we need to make structural change in our government, in our economy, and in our country. So it begins with a pretty clear blow-it-up statement from Elizabeth Warren. It does, and it's her ideas that then really dominate the first hour of this debate. Senator Warren, in particular, put out a plan to break up tech companies. We have other candidates being asked to respond to her agenda. I feel very strongly about the need to check the corporate consolidation and let the free market work.

And then Elizabeth Warren getting to respond to them responding to her. Senator Warren, I mentioned you. If you wanted a really vivid picture of the way her plan and policy-driven campaign has really set the terms of this race for the other folks running, this was it. I have the courage to go after them. Thank you. So once Elizabeth Warren sets the tone, what stands out to you next?

All right, we're going to turn to the issue of health care right now and really try to understand where there may or may not be daylight between... There's this really, really revealing moment on health care where the whole field is asked... Who here would abolish their private health insurance in favor of a government-run plan? Just a show of hands to start off with. You have two candidates who say that they're in favor of that approach. One of them is Warren.

The other one is Bill de Blasio. And why is that surprising? Warren has been pretty careful on the single-payer issue that she has signed on to a Bernie Sanders Medicare for All bill, but she has sort of repeatedly stopped short of going full Bernie and saying, let's get rid of private health insurance and just do Canadian-style or European-style system instead. There are a lot of politicians who say, oh, it's just not possible. We just can't do it, have a lot of political reasons for this. What they're really telling you is they just won't fight for it. She knows who her competition is in this primary right now, that she has risen in this race. Bernie Sanders has fallen almost in direct proportion. His voters are moving in her direction, and presumably she wants to keep on attracting more of them. It could come at a price,

though. It's a much politically riskier position to take. You have moderate voters she would need to win in a general election. You have moderate voters who might be available to her in a primary who might shy away from that kind of message. We'll see what else she says on health care in the coming weeks and months, whether she really does allow there to be no daylight at all between her and Bernie Sanders. But we saw pretty quickly there was significant daylight between her and a couple other people on that stage. Well, I think it's a bold approach. It's something that Barack Obama wanted to do when we were working on the Affordable Care Act.

The most interesting response to me was Amy Klobuchar, the senator from Minnesota. She has run as a pretty explicitly moderate candidate in this race, and she didn't just talk about an alternative idea, but she talked about what she sees as essentially the political folly of the idea that Warren endorsed. I am just simply concerned about kicking half of America off of their health insurance in four years,

which is exactly what this bill says. Which is what that Bernie Sanders bill does. Let me turn to Senator Booker on this. Senator Booker, explain to me where you are. The other person who I thought was interesting on health care was Cory Booker. I absolutely will. First of all, we're talking about this as a health care issue, but in communities like mine, low-income communities,

it's an education issue. He was sort of a midpoint between Elizabeth Warren's let's overhaul the entire system from top to bottom and Amy Klobuchar's sort of unapologetically incrementalist alternative. And I believe the best way to get there is Medicare for all. But I have an urgency about this. He basically attempted to try to split the baby and say, We have to do the things immediately that are going to provide better care.

But thinks that change has to happen right now. And he's in favor of doing the things immediately that would expand coverage. The implicit message there is single-payer is not going to happen overnight, so it's not something that he would promise to do in the first year of his administration. It's a pattern we saw a couple times in that debate, usually with Warren and Klobuchar as the two poles of the argument and the other candidates lined up in between. and Klobuchar as the two poles of the argument and the other candidates lined up in between.

Watching that image of Oscar and his daughter Valeria is heartbreaking. It should also piss us all off. There was a different policy issue entirely where Elizabeth Warren was not a major player in the conversation, where you had Julian Castro and Beto O'Rourke really going at it over immigration policy.

The reason that they're separating these little children from their families is that they're using Section 1325 of that act. And whether the next Democratic president ought to try to reform the system on an ambitious scale, but on a pretty conventional set of democratic policies, or whether they should do something that essentially kicks out one of the pillars of the current enforcement system entirely. Some of us on this stage have called to end that section, to terminate it. Some, like Congressman O'Rourke,

have not. And I want to challenge all of the candidates to do that. That's Julian Castro's proposal to repeal the law that makes unlawful border crossing a criminal offense rather than just a civil offense. Essentially decriminalizing undocumented immigration. Literally decriminalizing.

And the Beto O'Rourke alternative— Actually, as a member of Congress, I helped to introduce legislation that would ensure that we don't criminalize those who are seeking asylum and refuge in this country. If you're fleeing desperation— I'm not talking about the ones that speak in asylum. He has put out a suite of immigration reform policies that don't really touch that Castro proposal. They focus on doing things like increasing the capacity of the immigration system to process people, not detaining people who are not accused of crimes besides immigration offenses, adding all the sorts of protections for DREAMers and other undocumented folks that Democrats have advocated for for a long time. We would not turn back Valeria and her father, Oscar. We would accept them into this country and follow our own asylum laws. So at this point in the debate, after hearing the way these candidates are breaking down on health care and now on undocumented immigration, what are you thinking?

on undocumented immigration. What are you thinking? I'm thinking that, among other things, this shows how the center of gravity in this party has moved very, very substantially to the left since 2016, that these ideas for single-payer health care, for decriminalizing certain kinds of border crossing, these are not seen as fringe ideas. They're not even seen by much of the party as terribly controversial or dangerous ideas. These are entirely within the mainstream of democratic politics right now. That wasn't true at this point in 2015. Right. No one on that stage was dismissing out of hand the idea of upending the current healthcare system

or decriminalizing illegal border crossings, which is, I guess, a major moment for the party. And in fact, the people who were pushing back on those ideas were doing so. And I am happy to look at his proposal, but I do think you want to make sure that you almost apologetically or certainly carefully and defensively. Why do you disagree? I don't think I disagree. I think we have a serious problem in our country.

There's a level of concern even among moderate Democrats, folks who are proud of their center-left credentials. There's a level of sensitivity to the fact that this is a party that basically in its DNA wants to do big liberal things and has to be persuaded to go about doing them differently. I am in this fight because I believe that we can make our government, we can make our economy, we can make our country work, not just for those at the top. We can make it work for everyone. And I promise you this, I will fight for you as hard as I fight for my own family. So from what you're saying, the blow it up camp has a built-in advantage in this debate, and everybody seems to be orienting themselves around them. I don't think there was any indication last night that someone other than Elizabeth Warren became a more dominant presence on that stage, that she set the tone at the beginning, she set the tone at the end. I'd be very surprised if you saw her poll numbers

change for the worse. And that will do it for night one of this two-night event. And guess what? We've got 10 more candidates tomorrow night. So by the end of night one, we have a debate dominated by those calling for the most significant structural changes in our economy, in our society, in our political system.

How does that set up what we're going to see on night two, Thursday night? Look, I think if last night's debate were the only debate, that there were only those 10 candidates, or if you watched last night's debate and somehow missed tonight's debate, you would come away thinking that the Democratic Party was defined by this real ethos of blow it up, change the system, break up the system. You would not know that

the leading figure in the race by a good margin at this point is the ultimate institutionalist, the ultimate incremental, let's just work within the system as it currently exists, make some positive changes here or there, but basically leave things intact. And that's Joe Biden. Well, we will check back in with you in a few hours and we'll find out if you're right. We'll see. We'll be right back. Okay, Alex, it is now 12.15 on Friday morning. Thank you for doing this again. Who was on stage this time? debate, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, and then the supporting cast of the debate, John Hickenlooper, the former governor of Colorado, Michael Bennett, senator from Colorado, Kirsten Gillibrand, our senator here in New York, Congressman Eric Swalwell, and then Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson, the real political newcomers in the race. Nailed it. Bravo. And you did have a cheat sheet. Yeah. How did the second debate begin?

We're going to start today with Senator Sanders. Good evening to you. So from the very start, you have this stark ideological contrast between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. The very first question goes to Bernie Sanders. My question to you is, will taxes go up for the middle class in a Sanders administration? And if so, how do you sell that to voters? Well, strikingly, but also in a very on-brand way, he essentially stuck to his guns on that. People who have health care under Medicare for all will have no premiums, no deductibles, no copayments, no out-of-pocket expenses. Yes, they will pay more in taxes, but less in health care for what they get.

Thank you, Senator. But that in the big picture, he was entirely happy to make this very blunt populist argument that, yeah, you've got to take the insurance companies out of the picture. You've got to pay more to the government, and you've got to restructure the system from top to bottom. Right. You've got to blow it up. We think it is time for change, real change. And by that, I mean that health care, in my view, is a human right.

And Joe Biden is asked about the speech, Alex, that you have focused on. You said we shouldn't, quote, demonize the rich. You said nobody has to be punished. No one's standard of living would change. Nothing would fundamentally... Essentially, nothing's really going to change in America under a Biden presidency. Obviously, a very stark difference with Bernie Sanders.

And Biden sort of pivots out of it. What I meant by that is, look, Donald Trump thinks Wall Street built America. Ordinary middle-class Americans built America. My dad used to have an expression. He said, Joe, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. He doesn't repudiate his remarks. He doesn't go back on them and say, actually, I will go after the wealthy.

And the contrast with Sanders, he really leaves implicit that his focus is going to be on providing new benefits to the middle class. They have to have insurance that is covered and they can afford it. They have to make sure that we're here in a situation where there's continuing education and they're able to pay for it. These are pretty conventional liberal policies. They are not blow-it-up policies. vision that we have been talking about with you. These two leading candidates on either pole, restoration versus sweeping change. And it really intensifies exactly along those lines for the

first couple stages of the debate. And unlike on Wednesday night, you had some real fire on the more moderate side. The bottom line is if we don't clearly define that we are not socialists, the Republicans are going to come at us every way they can and call us socialists. You had folks like John Hickenlooper, the Colorado governor, come right out at the top, directly taking on Bernie Sanders. When Senator Sanders says that Canada is single-payer, there are 35 million people in Canada. There are 330 million people in the United States, easily the number of people on a public option. You had Michael Bennett a little later in the debate come out and really, really stress this one element of the Bernie Sanders health care plan

that many Democrats and a lot of Republicans see as politically toxic. He has said over and over again, unlike others that have supported this legislation, over and over again, that this will ban making illegal all insurance except cosmetic, except insurance for, I guess that's for plastic surgery. That is a much, much more forceful counterpunch against the more left-wing, comprehensive reform type of candidates than we heard from anyone on Wednesday. So finally, there's some actual fighting over these two approaches.

And some real fighting on behalf of the more moderate wing of the party that, you know, on Wednesday, we heard Elizabeth Warren make her argument for big structural change with at best a kind of passive-aggressive pushback on that. We got just aggressive-aggressive pushback tonight. Well, how did these candidates differentiate themselves when it came to the specifics of the policies that they advocate for? Well, much as we saw on Wednesday night, health care was a really, really crucial differentiator.

We asked a question about health care last night that spurred a lot of discussion, as you know. We asked a question about health care last night that spurred a lot of discussion, as you know. We're going to do it again now. There was another, you know, raise your hand if you support displacing the private health insurance system question. There were not a lot of takers for that one that you saw. Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris go in for that. I think it does show you between the two nights that that does remain a real lefty litmus test that even some pretty progressive candidates are not entirely comfortable embracing. I thought it was especially striking that Harris raised her hand for that. after becoming a candidate about getting rid of the private health insurance system, then really seemed to massage her position back into a place that, you know, aspirationally single payer is great, but as a pragmatic matter, I suspect that if she were to elaborate on her position, it might not have changed all that much. But in that binary moment where you have to choose to

put your hand up or down. She put her hand up. She put her hand up. And what does that tell you that she put her hand up in that moment? Well, I think from the start of her campaign, we've seen her trying to pick out a very, very specific ideological and oratorical space in this race where she wants to run as a candidate of change. She wants to run as a candidate who solidly progressive voters can embrace, but she doesn't want to run as a Bernie Sanders-style democratic socialist, right? So that is a very specific needle to thread. This was one of the very few issues with which I disagreed with the administration, with whom I otherwise had a great relationship and a great deal of respect. There was, and really kind of previewing the biggest exchange of the night,

there was this really revealing moment where she talked about how she really differed from the Obama administration in terms of immigration enforcement. I was attorney general of California. I led the second largest department of justice in the United States. And on this issue, I disagreed with my president because the policy was to allow deportation of people who, by ICE's own definition, were non-criminals. OK, so you kind of just hinted at it, but let's discuss the moment of this debate. What leads to it? So Kamala Harris clearly came in prepared to confront Joe Biden on these terms. But the way it happens is it comes as almost a surprise to the folks on stage, that it begins as an exchange about policing in South Bend, Indiana. The police force in South Bend is now 6% Black in a city that is 26% Black.

Why has that not improved over your two terms as mayor? Because I couldn't get it done. Pete Buttigieg gets challenged on his handling of the officer-in officer involved shooting there. And I accept responsibility for that because I'm in charge. If the camera wasn't on and that was the policy, you should fire the chief. So under Indiana law, this will be investigated and there will be accountability for the officer involved. But you're the mayor, you should fire the chief if that's the policy and someone died.

And he makes a very contrite statement that sort of stresses the limitations of what he can say and do right now, given his official role. And that's when Kamala Harris steps in. We're going to get to you. Hang on. We're going to get to you. I would like to speak on the issue of race. And she wants to say something about race, but she wants to say something about Joe Biden as well. I couldn't agree more that this is an issue that is still not being talked about truthfully and honestly. There is not a black man I know, be he a relative, a friend or a co-worker, who has not been the subject of some form of profiling or discrimination. Growing up, my sister and I had to deal with the neighbor who told us her parents couldn't play with us because we were black.

the neighbor who told us her parents couldn't play with us because we were black. And I will say also that in this campaign, we've also heard, and I'm going to now direct this at Vice President Biden, I do not believe you are a racist. And I agree with you when you commit yourself to the importance of finding common ground. But I also believe, and it's personal, and it was actually very, it was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country. And she just goes directly at his recent comments about working with segregationist senators, his historic opposition to school busing.

And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me. Probably the most personally resonant moment, certainly that we saw in either debate, maybe that we've seen in the whole race so far. It cannot be an intellectual debate among Democrats.

We have to take it seriously. We have to act swiftly. And it was very clear immediately how thrown Biden was by that formulation. Senator Harris, thank you. Vice President Biden, you have been invoked. We are going to give you a chance to respond. What did he say in response to this formulation from Kamala Harris?

You know, it was a combination of sort of broad defensiveness and a little personal indignation. It's a mischaracterization of my position across the board. I did not praise racists. That is not true, number one. Number two, if we want to have this campaign litigated on who supports civil rights and whether I did or not, I'm happy to do that. I was a public defender. I didn't become a prosecutor. I came out, I left a good law firm to become a public defender when in fact... And then he really insisted that she was misrepresenting his position on busing, saying that he wasn't opposed to busing as a general matter, but as a policy mandated by the Federal Department of Education.

Vice President Biden, do you agree today, do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America? No. Do you agree? I did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That's what I opposed. He seemed to be building to a kind of crescendo, talking about all the civil rights issues he has worked on the Voting Rights Act. I'm the guy that extended the Voting Rights Act for 25 years. I've also argued very strongly that we, in fact, deal

with the notion of denying people access to the ballot box. I agree that everybody wants to stay in fact. Anyway, my time's up. I'm sorry. Thank you, Vice President. And then he abruptly says, oh, I'm out of time. And there's kind of no climax to the riff. Right. So, Alex, what do you think Kamala Harris ended up accomplishing in this exchange with Joe Biden? What do you think Kamala Harris ended up accomplishing in this exchange with Joe Biden? Well, by challenging Biden, she first and foremost really exposed his vulnerabilities as a candidate, raised doubts among Democrats about just how strong he is in this primary and perhaps how strong he would be in a general election against Donald Trump. She's not the only candidate we saw do that. We saw candidates to the left, like Kirsten Gillibrand, candidates to the center, like Michael Bennett, both really going after the central proposition of Biden's candidacy,

that he is a statesman who can forge important compromises. When you add up the picture of those two candidates and Harris challenging Biden in this way, it's a pretty forbidding omen for what the next couple months of his candidacy might look like. What Harris accomplished for herself, I don't think you could have scripted a more powerful moment for her or any candidate to really just arrive as a personality in the Democratic Party. Yeah, it's interesting how much this felt like a breakout moment, less in terms of the framework we have been talking about, blow it up or restore America to pre-Trump, and more just a moment of pure personality and presence. And this is something you and I have discussed a lot, is the power of personality, the power of

identity in democratic politics, that there are a lot of voters in the party out there for whom the hair-splitting policy differences between two candidates may ultimately be less important in this primary than the idea of having this very forceful next-generation African-American woman out there making a case for values that they care about. You know, we've been talking about big structural change in the system in terms of the operations of government, the machinery of government in the economy and enacting change that way. There are voters in the Democratic Party who see the idea of electing a next generation African-American woman as the president as a pretty big structural change on its own. Right. It becomes about what the candidate embodies by just being, to a degree, than whether or not their ideas are so revolutionary.

Absolutely. And so far, we have seen her, more than I think any other candidate in the race, walk this very difficult line between wanting to embrace a pretty traditional progressive agenda, but also infusing that whole picture with her personality, her identity, her biography. We saw her do that in the debate tonight in a way we have not seen before. So in some ways, she has the benefit of being a kind of hybrid figure here where her identity is the change, is the disruption, and her policies can still embrace

some of the more traditional, restrained Democratic agenda. And it doesn't seem like a lot of other candidates on that stage could navigate that. No, and in a lot of ways, there's only one recent model for doing that at the presidential level, and it's Barack Obama. So earlier today, we talked about this idea that if you had just watched the first debate, you'd think that the left had kind of co-opted the Democratic Party. If you've just watched these two debates now, what is your understanding of the Democratic field? I think you still see between the two debates that the Democratic Party has clearly moved quite far to the left. But the nature of that liberalism, that progressivism is really pretty up for grabs that I think the stark difference between Elizabeth Warren's version of sweeping change and Kamala Harris's version of big change in politics and the the Joe Biden approach puts a whole lot of cultural and policy questions up for grabs in this Democratic primary.

It does feel like we went into this talking about Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. And now we're talking about two different candidates, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris. And to the extent that the race becomes a debate about the nature of sweeping change in the party with Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris representing a couple of different versions of sweeping change, it tells you that the Joe Biden vision has not really caught on. I do think it's too early for us to imagine that Joe Biden has totally vanished as a force in this race or that the more moderate approach is not going to be persuasive to a lot of Democrats. But when you think about the people

who have clearly inspired Democratic voters in these two debates, it's a pair of women who are promising really big changes of pretty different kinds. Alex, thank you. Thank you. After the debate, Senator Kamala Harris was asked about raising her hand in support of abolishing private health insurance. Harris said she misinterpreted the question and still supports allowing Americans to keep their private insurance.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday, the Supreme Court issued two rulings about how power and resources are allocated. about how power and resources are allocated. In the first case, the court ruled that federal courts have no authority to challenge partisan gerrymandering, finding that that power resides with the state lawmakers who draw election districts. The decision will reinforce the tactic of creating voting districts

that deliberately favor a single party. In the second case, the court found that the Trump administration has not offered a compelling justification for adding a question about citizenship to the 2020 census. The justices found that the administration had relied on a contrived explanation for asking about citizenship on the census. For now, the ruling will prevent a census question that critics feared would discourage undocumented immigrants

from filling out the forms and prevent government resources from reaching the places where they live. The Daily is made by Theo Balcom, Andy Mills, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lindsay Garrison, Annie Brown, Claire Tennesketter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon-Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Chung, Alexandra Lee Young, Jonathan Wolfe, Lisa Chow, Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Michaela Bouchard,

Stella Tan, and Julia Simon. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.