The NPR Politics Podcast - The 3rd Democratic Debate Takeaways

Episode Date: September 13, 2019

Former Vice President Joe Biden, a focal point of attacks in the previous two debates, was more aggressive in Houston, while others like former Rep. Beto O'Rourke had moments of their own to command attention. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political correspondent Scott Detrow, White House reporter Ayesha Rascoe, and editor correspondent Ron Elving. 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

Exciting news before we start the show. We are doing a live taping of our podcast at the Warner Theater in Washington, D.C. on November 8th. Go to NPR presents dot org to get your tickets now. Now let's talk about that Democratic debate in Texas that was hosted by ABC News. Hey there. It's the NPR politics podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the campaign. I'm Aisha Roscoe. I also cover the White House. And I'm Ron Elving, Editor-Correspondent. And of course, that is Houston's own Beyonce Knowles instead of our regular theme music.

And the time now is 11.23 p.m. on Thursday, September 12th. The third Democratic debate just ended a bit ago and i'm here in studio in dc with ron hey ron good to be here with you dan scott and aisha where are you right now so i am looking down over the debate room it's in a gym on campus and i am on the little indoor running track hovering above the, looking down on all the spin. Aisha? Scott hovering. I'm in my bedroom,

which is very messy, so it's a lot of mess. But you know what is great about a messy bedroom is there are more clothes on the floor to dampen the sound and make it sound more like a studio. Tam, you are such a thorough journalist that you felt the need to say Knowles

when you said that was Beyonce Knowles. Oh, I thought it was Beyonce Smith. OK. All right. So we are all here tonight to break down the key moments from this, the third Democratic debate. But first, let us do our traditional thing by running through all of the candidates who are on the stage in order of their speaking time.

Aisha. Yes. So at the very top, but this is just time wise, speaking time wise, former Vice President Joe Biden, and he clocked in at 17 minutes, eight seconds. And right behind him came Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who clocked in at 16 minutes, 38 seconds. So after them, in kind of descending order, you have Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, California Senator Kamala Harris, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former HUD Secretary Julian Castro, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, former Texas Congressman Beto O'Rourke, and businessman Andrew Yang clocked in at the very end with eight minutes, one second. All right. So Ron, Scott, Aisha, this is the third of these debates.

What was, Ron, I'll start with you. What was your big takeaway from this? Unlike the first two rounds of these debates, even though there were 10 people on stage still, the way it was structured, the candidates each had a little bit more time to talk, a little more time for interchange, clarity. It seemed like a more healthy energy. There was more energy. It was a slightly more positive energy with one or two exceptions. Almost all the candidates had some strong moments. Almost all of them had some weak moments.

I thought Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren all helped themselves distinctively tonight. I didn't think Julian Castro on balance, although he had some strong moments, will come out of this stronger, or Andrew Yang or frankly, Kamala Harris, who continues to disappoint perhaps in comparison to her one strongest performance in the first round of the debate. Agreed with almost everything Ron said, which is, you know, not new. If this were a

presidential debate, I'd be like, but Scott, tell me where you disagreed with Ron. I have two main thoughts. Like Amy Klobuchar, I'm going to reject the premise of your question and say my own thoughts. First of all, I think that this was kind of a status quo debate. I don't think anything that tonight really shook up the debate or really massively changed any of these candidates fortunes. I think one really notable thing is that this evening showed that Joe Biden has really affected the conversation about health care. For months and months, Bernie Sanders really set the tone for health care. It was, do you agree with Bernie or disagree with Bernie? And most candidates said that, yeah, I agree with Bernie or at least big chunks of what Bernie's trying to do when it comes to

Medicare for all and in some forms of it going away with private health insurance. Over the last couple months, Joe Biden has really framed that as blowing up Obamacare, undoing the Affordable Care Act and saying, I'm the one who wants to build on Obamacare. Other people want to tear it down. So it was interesting to me that tonight Joe Biden made that point on stage, saying she's with Bernie, but I'm with Obama, speaking about Warren's support for Sanders' plan,

but then seeing so many of the other candidates make pains to say, thanks, Barack Obama. I think Barack Obama took a big first step. I really appreciated what Barack Obama did. And then criticize aspects of Sanders' plan. So clearly, I think many candidates are saying, Joe Biden might have a point here that voters are latching on to, and I need to moderate my health care position just a little bit.

Yeah, and that was my other takeaway, which is not a big takeaway, but that, you know, in past debates, there was at times some distancing from former President Obama. In this debate, there was so much embracing of President Obama. The senator says she's for Bernie. Well, I'm for Barack. We all owe a huge debt to President Obama. I want to give credit first to Barack Obama. My favor is something that what Barack Obama wanted to do from the very beginning.

I'm fulfilling the legacy of Barack Obama, and you're not. I'm going to say, hey, Joe, instead of saying, no, we can't, let's say, yes, we can. And that, of course, is a famous line from President Obama's first election campaign. It was his whole theme. Aisha, what what stood out to you from this debate? What stood out to me was how aggressive Joe Biden was. And to me, this was one of the first debates where he really seemed to act as if he were the frontrunner in the other one especially in that first one which I think most people agreed was not a strong performance for Joe Biden he he kind of leaned back a bit but in this

one he was aggressive there were moments and really just trying to set the tone instead of just responding you know he went after Bernie Sanders when it came to the health care debate, saying, oh, you think that once employers don't have to provide health care or aren't providing health care, that they're just going to give those savings back to the employers? You know, you say you're a socialist, you have a lot of faith in the private sector. I'm paraphrasing. And then also just when he he obviously had that moment in the first debate where he wouldn't go over the time limit. And he said, I'm done. He stopped himself. But in this one, he was like, I'm going for it. Everybody else is doing it. And he kept going. So I that to me stood out.

He definitely had more energy. We don't want to talk about low energy. He had he had more energy in this debate. Definitely. And let's face it, this was three hours long. It took some energy just to watch it. Imagine being out there on the in the ring and having everybody directing most of their negative energy mostly towards Biden and having all of the tension that goes with one of these events and being on your feet like that for three hours. That would test anyone, let alone someone who's about to be 77. One of the areas where he was particularly aggressive on policy was health care. And earlier we heard a little clip where he made a comparison. You know, you're for Bernie. I'm for Barack. Let's hear a bit more of that. I think we should have a debate on health care. I think I know that the senator says she's for

Bernie. Well, I'm for Barack. I think the Obamacare worked. I think the way we add to it, replace everything that's been cut, add a public option, guarantee that everyone will be able to have affordable insurance. And the senator he is referring to is Senator Elizabeth Warren, who supports a version of Medicare for all, or actually just Medicare for all. But when she was asked sort of specifically about, well, what will this mean for middle class taxes? She did, you know, a bit of a boxing move and jumped out of the way. What families have to deal with is cost, total cost. That's what they have to deal with.

And understand, families are paying for their health care today. Families pay. Every time an insurance company says, sorry, you can't see that specialist. Every time an insurance company says, sorry, that doctor is out of network. Sorry, we are't see that specialist. Every time an insurance company says, sorry, that doctor is out of network. Sorry, we are not covering that prescription. The question, of course, here was, are you going to raise taxes? And of course, the answer is inevitably yes. But she is saying, let's look at the total picture. Families are going to be better off. Their costs overall are going to be lower. And if they are paying a little more in tax, look at the people who are going to be paying a lot more in tax. And let's talk about the big corporations and let's

talk the very richest taxpayers. We're really going to go after them. As for the middle class, well, they'll have to chip in more in taxes, but they'll save so much more in their other costs. That's the pitch. But she didn't say that explicitly, though. And I was struck by how they were trying to get her on that point. And she just wouldn't say that explicitly, though, and I was struck by how they were trying to get her on that point. And she just wouldn't say she wouldn't say the word explicitly that would not say the word would not say taxes. No. One of the moments that stands out from this debate was sort of health care adjacent in that they were talking about health care. But it really seemed like former HUD Secretary Julian Castro was looking for an angle to go after Biden.

My plan would do that. Your plan would not. They do not have to buy in. They do not have to buy in. You just said that. You just said that two minutes ago. You just said two minutes ago that they would have to buy in. You said they would have to buy in. Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago? Are you forgetting already what you you said two minutes ago? Are you forgetting already what you said just two minutes ago? Yeah, that reaction kind of said it all

when he said that, did you just forget what you just said? And everybody was like, oh! I think it's notable that nobody else followed Castro's lead

and Castro dropped that after that first back and forth and did not return to that line of attack. And he may not, we don't know, but he may not have meant it to be quite so blunt a reference

to his age. I think so, Ron. But the audience reaction made it very clear how everyone took it. So whether he meant it or not, that's the way it goes into the book. I'll say this. I'll say Julian Castro has shown that he thinks through most of the things he does. He is pretty upfront about the political calculation that he puts into a lot of his actions. I have a debate question, which is in the first debate, Kamala Harris came in with her planned fight that she was going to have with Joe Biden. And Julian Castro clearly came into this

debate out to have a fight with Joe Biden. I know that initially the thought was that Kamala Harris really excelled in that fight with Biden. But in the end, I don't know, does it actually work? You know, since then, I've talked to a lot of voters who were like, you know, I thought she was really mean to Joe. It did not work in the long run because while she got a big spike and a lot of people noticed her and she sold that attack on him on busing very well. And it was a real vulnerability to a longstanding vulnerability of Joe Biden's. So she was really hitting a soft point. This thing tonight seemed a little bit more like a cheap shot, especially given the audience reaction.

And so when Buttigieg jumped in to to be critical of it and to, in a sense, implicitly defend Biden. This is why presidential debates are becoming unwatchable. This reminds everybody of what they cannot stand about Washington. That sort of cauterized the moment and they went on. They just moved on. And there did not seem to be an opportunity for him to benefit as there was for Harris in that first debate. All right, we are going to move on and take a break. And when we come back, Beto O'Rourke, Kamala Harris, foreign policy, and a few things we couldn't let go. From California, from Mississippi to Minnesota, millions of American businesses are using Google tools to grow online. The Grow with Google initiative supports small businesses by providing free digital skills workshops and one-on-one coaching in all 50 states, helping businesses get online, connect with new customers, and work more productively.

Learn more at google.com slash grow. Support also comes from BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers licensed professional counselors who specialize in issues such as depression, stress, anxiety, and more. Connect with your professional counselor in a safe and private online environment at your convenience. Get help at your own time and your own pace. Schedule secure video or phone sessions, plus chat and text with your therapist. Visit betterhelp.com slash politics to learn more and get 10% off your first month. There is no way of getting around it. College is really expensive. She was like, I have to go here. I just gonna die if I don't go. And then we looked at the cost. I said, well, you just to have to die. But there are strategies to help ease the burden.

Check out LifeKit's new episode from NPR on saving for college by subscribing to LifeKit All Guides. And we're back. And I want to start with Kamala Harris. She is the senator from California. And it seemed like she came into tonight's debate with one mission in mind and that was to entice president trump to tweet at her and maybe i'm wrong about this she may succeed that that little man behind the curtain the bottom line is this donald trump in office on trade policy you know he reminds me of that that in The Wizard of Oz. You know, when you pull back the curtain, it's a really small dude. And that was not her only time going after President Trump in the debate.

It seemed like every single time she spoke, she was like, let me turn this around. Well, she began the debate with her opening statement. She said, i'm going to directly address president trump who i know is watching and actually he was giving a speech to republicans in baltimore like an hour-long speech um but he was he'll tivo it he said he would he is a big tivower for sure it seemed like the strategy for this one was yes to get uh trump to maybe notice her and strike out at her or on twitter but also trying to make this distinction that look trump is the person we need to go after and that's always been the question during these campaigns like how much do you want to make it

about trump and so what she seemed to be trying to say is we want to beat Trump. None of this matters. And I think she did say none of this matters if we don't beat him. And so I'm the person to do that. That's what she was trying to do. Of course, people would debate whether it was successful. Yeah, I think she was almost trying to say, like, we can fight amongst ourselves, but really, we should just fight the other guy, maybe the one behind the curtain. Which can sometimes be a great unifying strategy. It just didn't seem to catch tonight. I want to turn to Beto O'Rourke and more broadly, the issue that he has really taken up since the mass shooting in El Paso and Dayton and later in West Texas. He has made that the centerpiece of his campaign, trying to get gun legislation and making other changes. And in particular, he has gone out farther than many other Democrats in the field, calling for not just a ban on new sales of assault-type style weapons, AR-15s, but a mandatory buyback, basically taking the guns away. And in Odessa, I met the mother of a 15-year-old girl who was shot by an AR-15. And that mother watched her bleed to death over the course of an hour because so many

other people were shot by that AR-15 in Odessa and Midland. There weren't enough ambulances to get to them in time. Hell yes, we're going to take your AR-15, your AK-47. And that's the closest he came to cursing, we should say. Yes, that was his mild cursing. This issue of the buybacks is, it's a tricky issue. And it may be why O'Rourke is so out on this and other people may not be joining him is because NPR had a poll the NPR PBS NewsHour Marist poll that came out earlier this week and what they found was that support for actual buybacks is really mixed so overall only 45% of

people are supporting buybacks and then now Democrats do support it more. You have 70% supporting it. Republicans, 23%. But those independents who you're probably going to want to win, they're only 40% support these buybacks. So this is something where there isn't, outside of the Democratic base, there doesn't seem to be widespread support. Even among House Democrats, they don't have a clear consensus on anything beyond background checks. They're not really ready to go for an assault weapons ban, even among House Democrats, looking for what they can get through the Judiciary Committee and through the House floor. They know they won't get anything through the Senate, of course, but just deciding what their unified position is in the House. So it's very hard to imagine that this is going to be the cutting edge of the Democratic platform next year. But maybe it will. And certainly incidents of the kind that have been suffered in El Paso,

so many other cities, middle in Odessa and Texas just in the last few weeks, have changed the conversation. But when President Trump talks about, oh, those scary Democrats, they want to take your guns away, what he's talking about is Beto O'Rourke and people who would support a mandatory gun buyback. And that is going to be a popular view among not only Trump Republicans, but also many independents. Foreign policy is something that we said would come up in this debate. And lo and behold, it did come up in this debate. One of our predictions was correct. You know, every once in a while. Well, you know, we just saw the National Security Advisor fired and we have just had this

extraordinary, phenomenal spectacle of watching the president say, you know, I had a secret meeting coming up at Camp David to settle that whole Afghanistan war thing. And now I called it off because one of our soldiers got killed. Clearly, they were going to have to get around to talking a little bit about foreign policy tonight. And they did talk about Afghanistan. They did talk, of course, about Iraq. It was another occasion for Joe Biden to have to do a dance about how he voted for the Iraq war. And he called it an authorization for the use of military force and didn't think it was really going to lead to a war. And we've heard it all before. But it was another moment for Biden to be vulnerable. He was specifically talking tonight about something that he told the NPR Politics podcast. He had said he had voted to authorize the war in order to give

President Bush leverage, but that he had begun to oppose the war the moment that bombs started dropping, the moment that it began. Well, that just wasn't true. Biden didn't really fully oppose the war until about two years later, and he addressed that discrepancy tonight. I said something that was not meant the way I said it. I said from that point on, what I was argued against in the beginning, once he started to put the troops in, was that, in fact, we're doing it the wrong way. So that was Iraq. But Afghanistan was a larger focus of the conversation in the debate and is

more present in a lot of people's minds because of what Ron talked about with the president potentially negotiating with the Taliban at Camp David and then scrapping it. Aisha, they were asked, what would you do? What did they say? Well, many of the candidates were basically saying that it's time for the U.S. to get out of Afghanistan, that the war has gone on too long. In particular, Warren said that she would pull out the troops even without a deal. We need to bring our troops home. And then we need to make a big shift. We cannot ask our military to keep solving problems that cannot be solved militarily. And several of the candidates said that as long as we could have the suppression of any terrorist threat to the United States originating in Afghanistan. Here we are just

a few days after the 18th anniversary of 9-11, which was planned and largely put together in Afghanistan. As long as we could be assured that that couldn't happen again, and we had the suppression of that kind of terrorist activity, we didn't really need to tell Afghanistan what kind of government it was going to have anymore and we could leave that part of the world. That seemed to be the basic thrust. Pete Buttigieg, who has actually served in Afghanistan, wanted to make that point and also wanted to say that we shouldn't be looking at any of our troops and telling them that we're not going to stand with them and that we are not going to be committed to the things we send them into the field to die for. So as with every debate, there were a lot of things covered. There were also a lot of things

that weren't covered. And there are a few stray moments that I feel like we should probably talk about. One of those was Vice President Biden in a very long answer about schools and segregation, he started talking about turntables. Play the radio. Make sure the television, excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night. Make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school, a very poor background,

will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get there. So many words. There were so many words there were so many words it is a very real point about making sure your kids hear a lot of words that is a that is although the study that that kind of came from there like questions about that because it said that like poor people or people in welfare their kids hear like millions less words and there's a question about whether that's actually the case.

But yes, you should talk to your kids. It's important. Yeah, and I narrate everything for my poor children. Like their whole lives are like one NPR politics podcast. And now we're eating bananas. Ooh, bananas. Understood. Understood.

My daughter would make the same complaint. But the thing was the record player, right? That was the issue. The record player is what's going to stick. Play the record player for your kids. I texted our colleague, Kelsey Snell, making fun of this. And as soon as I hit send, I regret it. I thought, oh, Kelsey is actually someone who probably would have a record player.

And five minutes later, she was like, hey, I have a record player. Yeah, because record players are cool again. They're back. Vinyl is cool. Scott, what can you not let go of from today? You know, I'll admit, and I know our bosses are listening, so I will say that this does not take up too much mental energy on debate nights, but on debate nights, I've got a side passion project, and that is

hashtag debate dogs. This actually started in 2016 during the general election debate. Sam Sanders and I just, at one point when they were really grim and really toxic, we were just like, hey, everybody, just tweet a picture. If your dog is watching the debate, tweet us a picture of your dog watching the debate. And people did that. And then when the first debate started up again this year, a couple of listeners remembered it and said, hey, are you still doing debate dogs? And I was like, you're right. We are still doing debate dogs. So every debate night, I encourage people to tweet pictures of their dog watching the debate on TV with the hashtag Debate Dogs. I retweet as many as I can when I am, of course,

not working very hard focusing on my day job. Or your late night job. Or my late night job. But a lot of great pictures came in. If you have a dog and you watch the debate with them, please join Debate Dogs next time around. And I will just say I lost my pooch earlier this year, and that makes these pictures that come in on my Twitter feed,

because I certainly have an entire column dedicated to this, makes me really happy to see all the dogs, especially beagles, watching the debates. And it was very telling that about halfway through this three-hour debate, most of the dogs in the pictures were fast asleep. Aww. Aww. That is a wrap for today we will be back as soon as there's political news that you need to know about until then join us on facebook and our brand new facebook group it's a place for you to connect with us and other podcast listeners

just head to n.pr slash politics group and request to join. Scott, you had better post some dog pictures in there. Yes, I will. Okay, good. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the campaign. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. I also cover the White House. And I'm Ron Elbing, editor correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.