The NPR Politics Podcast - The 2nd Democratic Debates: Night 2 Takeaways

Episode Date: August 1, 2019

CNN hosted the second Democratic presidential debates, which was split into two nights because the sheer number of candidates running. In the second night, former Vice President Joe Biden was front and center as candidates spent most of the time attacking his proposed policies and track record. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political correspondent Asma Khalid, political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, and political editor Domenico Montanaro. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Asma Khalid. I'm covering the 2020 campaign. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics. And I'm Domenico Monsenaro, political editor.

And it is 12.05 a.m. on Thursday, August 1st, and the second night of the second Democratic presidential debate just wrapped up on CNN. And Danielle and I are in Washington, D.C. Yep. Domenico Asma, where are you? We are in the lovely city of Detroit, Michigan. We just got back from watching the debate in the filing center.

We made our 10-minute walk or so back to the hotel. So, again, we could have a nice quiet spot so our listeners could hear us. It sounds lovely good so uh danielle as we did last night i am hoping that we can start this pod off with you listing the candidates who were there on stage in order of their speaking time all right so the person who spoke the most tonight was former vice president joe biden with 21 minutes and 21 seconds which was a lot more than the number two person, California Senator Kamala Harris, who spoke herself five minutes more than Cory Booker, New Jersey Senator at number three. Then after that, you had in order New York Senator

Kirsten Gillibrand, then Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard, Washington Governor Jay Inslee, former HUD Secretary Julian Castro, Colorado Senator Michael Bennett, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and last but not least, entrepreneur Andrew Yang at eight minutes, 34 seconds. So he had less than half the time of Joe Biden. Well, and so you talk about Joe Biden. Joe Biden, I think, had more speaking time tonight than any candidate in either night of the debates. And when we came into this debate, Domenico, we were saying the big question is, what is Joe Biden going to do and what is everyone else going to do in relation to Joe Biden. So what happened? Well, he was piled on. I mean, you know, everybody came at him. He was center of the stage and the center of the focus for all of the candidates. And he was uneven, frankly. He came out ready to go talking about Kamala Harris on

health care. As the night wore on, his responses, his defenses were not as fluid stylistically. And frankly, if you were to ask me who won the debate tonight, I would say Elizabeth Warren. She, as we know, was not on the stage. We still haven't seen her on stage with Joe Biden. So we haven't seen what kind of interactions they might have and how much she might pile onto him. Yeah. And, you know, Biden just faced criticism from Kamala Harris. He fended off attacks on multiple fronts. You know, I would say Harris on health care. Vice President Biden's campaign calls your plan, quote, a have it every which way approach.

What do you say to that? Well, they're probably confused because they've not read it. Issues of gender from New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. So under Vice President Biden's analysis, am I serving in Congress resulting in the deterioration of the family because I had access to quality, affordable daycare? Issues around his record on criminal justice from New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. If you want to compare records, and frankly, I'm shocked that you do, I am happy to do that. And so one of the side effects of him being attacked on all these fronts is that he spoke more than anyone else. That being said, I don't know that we can say

that the quantity of time that he spoke necessarily led to him being seen as sort of a candidate who is the best equipped to defeat Donald Trump. And I think that that is some of what people wanted to hear from him tonight. I think after the first debate, there were questions about whether he would be up to the challenge to be able to to fight off against Trump in a debate, say in a general election. Tonight, I think he answered some of those questions, but maybe not for everyone. Right. And I think what's really important to bring up here is that, you know, Joe Biden is quite a bit older than a lot of the people who were attacking him tonight. And I think Joe Biden, to a lot of these candidates, you know, yes,

he's very experienced. He has this resume. He is associated with Obama. He is popular in his own right. But also, I think to a lot of Democrats, he kind of symbolizes the past in a party that has very rapidly, as we talked about last night, very rapidly changed. But that's a part, that's a fight, Danielle, I don't know that has been fully resolved in the Democratic Party. Oh, it hasn't. When you go out and talk to voters, I do think that there is this intra-Democratic party sort of identity crisis that folks are going through, trying to figure out who they want to be as a party. And you can go to plenty of places where Joe Biden's brand of democratic policies is precisely what people do want. But Joe Biden was not the only person who was taking incoming from other people on stage tonight, last night, whatever we're saying it is. Time warp.

Time. It's so hard to figure out time when we do these podcasts in the middle of the night. But California Senator Kamala Harris also had to answer for her ideas about health care and also her record on criminal justice. Let's start with health care, where Vice President Joe Biden came in ready to criticize the plan that Harris just put out this week. Anytime someone tells you you're going to get something good in 10 years, you should wonder why it takes 10 years. If you notice, there's no talk about the fact that the plan in 10 years will cost $3 trillion. You will lose your employer-based insurance. And in fact, you know, this is the single most important issue facing the public. And to be very blunt and to be very straightforward, you can't beat President Trump with double talk on this plan. Your response, Senator Harris?

Absolutely. Unfortunately, Vice President Biden, you're just simply inaccurate in what you're describing. The reality is that our plan will bring health care to all Americans under a Medicare for all system. So the basic disagreement, and I will try to keep this short here, is this. Joe Biden backs a public option plan. We talked about this last night. It gives you the option of buying into a publicly administrated insurance plan. Very simple. Senator Kamala Harris, now she has put out a plan that she's calling Medicare for all. It is not exactly, it is not like Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All. It would leave room for private insurance plans. It would look a fair bit like current Medicare where you can buy into a private plan via something called Medicare Advantage, also known as Medicare Part C. see. So tonight on the stage, even though you had a few people up there who do back Bernie Sanders,

I would say more drastic plan, which would largely eliminate private insurance. You have people, Bill de Blasio, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, who all back something like that. The big disagreement was between Kamala Harris' plan and between Joe Biden's plan. So the debate tonight, it didn't divide in exactly the same way that the debate last night did in terms of progressives versus moderates. Because in this case, Harris is not as progressive as the progressives. So the big difference to me felt like last night, the debates were really around big, broad public policy issues. And tonight, the debates all felt far more personal. And we saw that, you know, with the pile on around both Biden and Harris. And Harris was not just criticized for health care.

She was criticized rather effectively by Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard for her record as a prosecutor. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California. And she fought to keep cash bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way. Thank you, Congresswoman. Senator Harris, your response. launch. As the elected Attorney General of California, I did the work of significantly reforming the criminal justice system of a state of 40 million people, which became a national model for the work that needs to be done. Harris was trying to defend this record. And to me, one of the biggest indications that this night did not go entirely the way the Harris campaign had hoped for was the fact that after the debate wrapped up, Harris herself came out into the spin

room and was answering questions defending her prosecutorial record to reporters. That's right. Generally, a candidate does not come out to the spin room if they've had a great night. And we saw that with Harris. And we also saw a huge entourage from the Biden campaign in the spin room as well. We didn't see him, but they know that rule. But they did have a significant number of advisors in there. So, you know, I think both of them felt like there was some cleaning up they needed to do. Can I just say that this debate felt again, like it was being set up like some sort of Real Housewives. Well, yeah. Keep going, please.

No, no. Daniel, you have a better grasp on this analogy than I do. Right. Not that I'm claiming I haven't watched Real Housewives. No, this is an analogy that a friend of mine used last night, the Real Housewives questions. We saw this last night with questions about, for example, Senator so-and-so, you have said that certain people in this race have done X, Y, Z. Can you tell us who you were referring to? And like, please attack each other. And tonight, they did it again. You think it was for ratings? I mean, let's be real. Sometimes that's what I think it's about. I mean, it's hard to really debate substantive policy issues in these quick little back and forths. But so speaking of attacks and and fighting and whatever, scrapping, some of that happened as relates to criminal justice and Vice President Joe Biden and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. And it seemed like Vice President Joe Biden

came to this debate with his briefing book full of information about Booker's time as mayor of Newark, New Jersey. Why did you announce in the first day a zero tolerance policy of stop and frisk and hire Rudy Giuliani's guy in 2007 when I was trying to get rid of the crack cocaine disorder. Mr. Vice President, there's a saying in my community,

you're dipping into Kool-Aid and you don't even know the flavor. I looked it up on Urban Dictionary. Did anybody else? Translate, please. I mean, it's just like you're talking about something you don't know anything about. Sure. What flavor is the Kool-Aid, Tam?

My favorite flavor of Kool-Aid is blue. It is both a color and a flavor. Yeah. Booker, to me, was somebody who came away rather effectively doing what he needed to do, which was raise his profile. He had not really had memorable moments as much from the first debate. And he had a couple of moments where he effectively was able to critique Joe Biden. Yeah. And the area which he was doing this in this part of the debate we're talking about now, Asma, was the 1994 crime bill that Biden was very involved in authoring. And which there is some evidence from experts that it did contribute to mass incarceration. So Vice President Biden, for all of the incoming that he's taken for the last month and a half, is still leading in the polls. And a big part of the reason, as I understand it, Asma, that he's leading in the polls is that he still has incredibly strong support among the African-American community, in particular, older people in the

African-American community who are incredibly, older people in the African-American community who are incredibly reliable Democratic primary voters. That's right. And I saw some evidence of that last week when I was out to the NAACP annual conference, as well as the National Urban League conference. He was very well received in both of those spaces. And some people told me that they felt that the attacks Biden had endured during the first debate were unfair. Because he has, as the Biden campaign internal polling suggests, that he has about 50, 51 percent of the black vote at this point, that people like Harris, people like Booker and others who need that vote are trying to peel some of it away. All right. We are going to take a quick break.

And when we get back, immigration. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Google. Veteran Mitch Hoyt founded Skinny Sticks Maple Syrup, and he's showing that small businesses can do big things. Mitch started making syrup from a few trees in his Wisconsin backyard and now is connecting with customers worldwide with help from Google tools. Skinny Sticks is one of millions of small businesses using Google to grow. Learn how Google is helping businesses in your state at google.com slash economic impact. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This week on Hidden Brain, we kick off our annual summer series, You 2.0. Ideas and advice about how you can respond to life's chaos.

Let's do a just check to my inbox. Just check, just check, just check to my phone real quick. With wisdom. Listen to Hidden Brain from NPR every week. And we are back. And we are now in a section where we are going to talk about the discussion that happened on the Democratic debate stage about immigration. And lo and behold, it was another opportunity for various other people on that stage to get into scuffles with Vice President Joe Biden. So you had Julian Castro attacking Joe Biden on immigration in particular. Julián Castro, former HUD secretary, who early on pushed for decriminalizing border crossings, which has become one of the big sort of hand-raising do-your-or-don't-you-support-it issues in this Democratic primary. So here's an exchange between Biden and Castro. It's going to

start with Biden. He is arguing that it should be a criminal offense to cross the border illegally. If you cross the border illegally, you should be able to be sent back. It's a crime. It's a crime. And it's not one that, in fact. Thank you, Mr. Vice President. Secretary Castro, please. First of all, Mr. Vice President, it looks like one of us has learned the lessons of the past and one of us hasn't. Let me begin by telling you. Immigration is an issue for which Joe Biden does need to answer to some of the more progressive parts of the Democratic primary, in part because President Obama was criticized, you might recall, even during his reelection, but in 2012, from Latino activists around the

fact that there were a number of deportations during his administration's time. And actually, at the debate tonight, there were some activists in the crowd who interrupted Biden at one point and started chanting 3 million deportations in reference to those Obama era deportations. It is fascinating, though, that, you know, since 2013, when Democrats and Republicans came together to pass comprehensive immigration overhaul in the Senate, we had 68 people vote for that, that Senator Michael Bennett brought up again tonight, noting that he was go to the back of the line to wait, all of the things that needed to be done to be able to try to fix the system in a broad way, as opposed to now talking about decriminalization of border crossings being the thing, because Donald Trump is

instituting a policy of family separations that Democrats are trying to say that criminalization is the reason he's able to do that, which others in the party disagree with. It is fascinating how far the party has gone on that issue. You know, one other divide that came out in this debate was sort of a divide between the people who are running for president now and the last Democratic president. Now, part of that is probably because his vice president is on stage and they're trying to make distance between themselves and him. There was this exchange between Senator Cory Booker and Vice President Biden that it was about immigration, but it then very quickly got to Obama.

He moved to fundamentally change the system. That's what he did. That's what he did. But much more has to be done. Much more has to be done. I still don't hear an answer. Senator Booker, please respond. Well, a couple things.

First of all, Mr. Vice President, you can't have it both ways. You invoke President Obama more than anybody in this campaign. You can't do it when it's convenient and then dodge it when it's not. After the debate, one of Biden's advisors was in the spin room and, you know, did highlight that fact to Domenico and I that it seems kind of strange that we heard this much criticism of President Obama, who still remains rather popular in the Democratic Party. Yeah, there continues to be a really big well of support for him. So as we wind down two nights of debates, has anything changed? I think after two rounds of these of these debates, a few things became pretty clear. One is that, you know, former Vice President Joe Biden was clearly going to be in the focus.

And, you know, before coming into this primary process, former Vice President Biden was clearly going to be in the focus. And, you know, before coming into this primary process, former Vice President Biden was a pretty good debater. I don't think you can say that anymore after these first two debates. He had a kind of uneven, maybe, you know, did better than the last debate this time around, but it wasn't a great debate for him. If you have been following this campaign already, to some degree, I don't think these last two debates have really elucidated major policy differences, major substance differences between the candidates. You still know what you did going in, which is among at least the top polling ones, the highest, the ones raking in the most money. You still kind of know what lane they're in. You still know, like, who's more progressive, who's less, who's for Medicare for all, who's not, etc., etc., etc.

But I don't know how much more nuance we got or knowledge of their political strategies that we got. And it was really hard to do that given the format, right? You had candidates being offered one minute. And so it felt like the first 45 minutes of this debate when we were discussing health care, it was really focused on two candidates health care plans, Biden's and Harris's. And those are two plans that probably a vast majority of Americans have not actually read. And it was a rather confusing argument to follow. Yeah, very confusing. So, OK, this is a mean question, but are we going to be playing bye bye Bye by NSYNC on the podcast tomorrow or like in a few weeks?

Is this our official? Is this official now? This is our official adios candidate song. Yes, it is our official drop out of the race walk off song. I mean, look, only seven candidates have thus far qualified for the fall debates. And it is going to be very challenging to remain in this race if you do not have the national platform of being on a debate stage debating your ideas. I do feel like though, if we have multiple candidates who don't get on the debate stage, I kind of want a little bit of a Sarah McLachlan I will remember you like waterfall for all of the candidates rather than a bye bye bye.

Wait, how about one shining moment? We have an emotional montage. That'd be if they had one shining moment. I am shutting this down because we have to do another podcast in 12 hours. Oh, come on. Might as well just keep going. Let's just plow through.

All right. We are going to leave it there for now. You know, two nights ago, we launched our Facebook group and throughout the debates, other NPR politics listeners joined in on some live analysis and discussion about the debates. It's great. There's a bunch of you in there. We will continue to post over there and facilitate discussions around the biggest political news and topics from the podcast. You can join by heading over to n.pr slash politics group. And if you already requested to join, but you have not been approved, it probably means that you did not fill out the survey in order to get access. You have to prove you're a real podcast listener.

And not a Russian bot. Yes. Head back to the group, fill in those answers, because we do want to talk to you. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Asma Khalid. I'm covering the 2020 campaign. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.