The Press Box - CNN Democratic Debate Reactions | The Press Box

Episode Date: July 31, 2019

Elizabeth Warren takes on the moderates, Bernie writes the damn bill, and CNN makes John Delaney a star. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelly, and welcome to The Ringer Podcast Network. Up on our site, The Ringer is breaking down the 40 best singles and albums from 1999, covering Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, Maria Carey, and tons more. And to accompany that piece, we filmed our staffers discussing what they agreed and disagreed with from the article and debated what should have won. You can read the piece on The Ringer.com and watch the video at YouTube.com slash The Ringer. Hello, media consumers, Brian Curtis, and David Shoemaker of The Ringer here. with your instant reaction to round two of the Democratic debates or as it came to be known, David,

John Delaney's Spalding Gray monologue with America. It's nice to see you, by the way, in person. It's good to see you too, man. Welcome to Brooklyn. I know. It's nice. It's nice. All right, David. We're going to talk about a bunch of stuff, the farewell appearance of a bunch of Democratic long shots.

Also, CNN trying to make the debate into a never-ending speed round, at least for the first hour. That was weird. But I think the top story of the night is, something like this. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders repeatedly getting challenged by the moderates on stage, subjecting their ideas about Medicare and immigration to a kind of stress test. This was the Democratic Party asking itself, are we really going to nominate a lefty to beat Trump? Was it not? Well, I mean, technically it was CNN moderators asking the Democrats

that putting John Delaney up to the task of asking him. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, the way, yes, yes, I do agree with you. The way that it was formatted tonight, oddly made it feel sort of like a fait accompli that the answer would be, yes, we are going to nominate the lefty. And this is, the stress test is maybe a formality. Now, in another circumstance, maybe with different, you know, different moderate candidates or, you know, in a different setting, then it might have seemed like, it might have seemed like more of a justifiable question or justifiable argument to be having. But despite all the time that the moderate faction got on TV tonight, it felt,

I don't know. I mean, it seemed like they, it seemed like as hard as they tried to paint Sanders and particularly Elizabeth Warren is kind of beyond the pale or outside the norm or whatever turn or phrase you want to use, it just seemed like, like I said, Warren in particular, but Sanders too just seemed incredibly fine. like they they stood up to the stress. Was that just me? No, I think that's right.

But I think it goes directly to quality of debater. Yeah. I mean, in a, hopefully in an upcoming debate, we will see Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren on the same stage. Yes. But until that moment comes, we have to make do with a bunch of one percenters kind of playing the role. And I think what we learned tonight,

before we even get to the ideological part of it, is that they're just not as good a debate is Elizabeth Warren. Nobody is on that stage. I don't think anybody in the Democratic field is. No. She's really good at this. She's very good at it.

And she's, I mean, you get the feeling that she's debating with a bunch of people that, I mean, it can't be true, but you get, but it came off

as if she's debating against people who, who were shocked that there was someone there to disagree with them. Mm-hmm. Yeah. No,

absolutely. It's like, when I talk to my buddies about this, they all just nod in approval. But when I, you know, when I get on stage, I don't know, what's going on? This is a well-formed argument on the other side.

When they were talking about Medicare for All, which was the big first section of the debate, which is essentially Bernie and Warren, you're for it. Everybody else take a bunch of shots at them and see if they hold up. Warren talked about her friend, Addie Barkin, and was talking about why he needed insurance. And then, you know, even in her second answer, came back to that point and admonished the audience for laughing, really trying to personalize the issue. Take us out of this whole idea of you're going to force people off their private insurance and into an actual story. Later in that same section, she took an answer about this.

Again, everybody's sort of having this theoretical debate. She turns it around on Republicans and insurance companies, which she's very, very good at. You saw this time and a time again tonight. She would take an answer and completely turn it into a winning answer, no matter what, no matter whether you agreed with her on the policy or not. not. Yeah, I mean, it felt like Bernie had well-formulated, I think, largely correct answers to most of the questions that were put to him. But Elizabeth Warren seemed to have that, but also the ability to turn the conversation in the direction that she wanted at any given moment. Should we go ahead and play the sound bite of the night? Because I think this gets to a larger point, which is not just ideologically what kind of candidate do you want to be the Democratic nominee. but what kind of ambition do you want the Democratic nominee to have?

These things may go hand in hand. Here is Warren tangling with Delaney about what kind of ideas a Democratic candidate should put out there. I don't understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can't do and shouldn't fight for. I think it's worth, this may seem like a minor point. But I do think it's worth saying that there's a, I mean, that was an incredibly compelling thing for her to say.

And I think that it really made the case for her campaign. And also that, you know, Bernie's campaign and some of the more forward-looking ones at the expense of the others that they were kind of set against tonight. But there is a degree, I mean, there is a degree to which this was a little bit of a show debate, right? I mean, and I guess that's what a televised debate is. But at the end of the day, they were talking about, it seemed like they were debating over. the number of years that instituting this plan that we all agree on is going to take play is going is going to take right i mean it was it wasn't exactly a semantic debate but to the to the to the degree that they were to the point that they were actually are cnn was staging it as if there was that you know eight of the people on

stage were against universal health care and that's i don't think the truth so i mean it it i don't know i think that that elizabeth warren you're right that does get to the point of the I mean, that that characterizes the entire evening to some extent. I think it was just a little bit mind-boggling the amount of time that Delaney and Hickenlooper and all the rest got to sort of spin the hamster wheel about why their practicality was more important than vision. It did have the feel of an old kung fu movie where you have the master and then like a hundred people run at him. Yeah. And he easily dispenses with all the lesser enemies. But then they just more keep coming.

Yeah. They don't stop. Well, it also has a feel of a zombie movie where like the person gets to, the zombie gets dispatched and then keeps on getting up. I mean, I understand the CNN set the terms for the debate tonight, but how many times do you want to come back to this where you're, I mean, this is where Elizabeth Warren's words, I think were really true. Where the third time that you're making the case about the impracticality of Medicare for all, it's sort of like, why is this the hill you're dying on? Like, why do you keep coming back to argue against, to make, to make this point? this can't be a central piece of your campaign, right? At least, I mean, you think it seems like Hickenlooper or anybody else would be more,

even Delaney is misbegotten as some of his campaign decisions are, you'd be better suited to be like, listen, there's not a big disagreement here. We're talking about implementation. So can we just move on to something we actually disagree on? And that's a great point, and I think that's why Warren and to a lesser degree Sanders are winning this argument. Because when you compare the two things, they are saying, here's this big articulate sweeping vision I have.

And the other people are going, coming back and saying, I like the idea, but I'm not sure you can get that past. Yeah. That doesn't stand up. B doesn't stand up against A. No. There's a way, we've seen this a little bit with Kamala Harris. There's a way to kind of be a moderate and translate that into a big sweeping thing.

Yeah. That sounds really appealing. No moderate is going to say, I want to do less. my opponents. That's not the way you win the nomination. Right. There, you know, the Democratic, the Democratic primary field, whatever they want, they may not want Medicare for all at the end of the date. They may not want to decriminalize border crossings, but they want somebody who's like, we're going to do a lot of stuff. Yeah. I've got a big vision to help people. Yeah. And I can, and I can articulate that in a way that's going to make it sound exciting. Yeah. I mean,

there's also the issue of politics and just not even politics. It's bigger than politics. because Hickenlooper, and I don't want to keep knocking the guy, but he talked about his real world practice. Go ahead. He kept talking about his real world experience and his, you know, small business and in a brew pub. Yeah, the brew pub. But his ability to get stuff done in a bipartisan way and it's sort of like, and how that's the better path forward than the argument that, you know, some of his other people up there were making, Sanders and Warren in particular. But it's like, yeah, if somebody's offering, if somebody's demanding $5,000 for a used car and you say, I'm going to, I'm going to bargain with this is. guy and offer him $4,900, he's going to say yes every single time. That doesn't mean you're a

master governor or anything else. But if you went up there and said, I'll give you $2,000 and you settled on four, which one is the better outcome? Right? It's the second one, right? You got to, you got to demand big things. You got to be visionary with your plans or else Elizabeth Warren's right. What's the point? You can pat yourself in the back for getting $100 off every used car, but like, it doesn't mean you were good at your job. What about Master Brewmaster? You think that's Put him on Bravo next season. It'll be great. Oh, that'd be good.

Kind of in a reality thing. Listen, I don't, I mean, I don't, of all of the candidates that were up there, of all of the lower tier candidates that were up there and even some of the mid-tier candidates, I don't have any problem with John Hickenlooper, man. He's a good dude. And he seems like he actually believes, he's actually a true believer in the things that he, in the arguments that he's making, I think, as opposed to some of those other people. But, man, he just seemed out of his depth up there.

And not just, not intellectually or anything like that. I think that it goes back to your initial question. Like, are the Democrats going to elect the lefty? I mean, yes. The answer is yes. Like what, I mean, John Delaney at times. I'd say the answer's maybe. Well, okay. I think you're right.

I think it depends on how you define lefty. John Delaney's not going to be the Democratic nominee. It looked like he took a wrong turn into the debate room and maybe ended up on the wrong stage. But like he, like, but I just don't think that, I think that with the two sides that were drawn tonight, I feel like the answer is clear. Now, you're right. When we get him on stage next to a Joe Biden or a Kamala,

Harris, depending on how she draws her own political lines. Yeah, I think that we'll have a more, we'll have a more spirited debate in that direction. Yeah, I was looking at the real clear politics polling average right before we came on. And reminder to both of us and everyone else out there that Joe Biden has recovered just about everything he lost from the last debate. Now, he's got a debate tomorrow night. So he may very well blow it again. Well, and then at that point and again, we'll be back to. But there's a raging moderate. Yeah. A guy who's saying, I am am a moderate. I do not believe what those other guys believe who is, who has at least nationally, and those polls are of somewhat limited value, but has a fairly sizable lead over all these other

people. I think what we, as I hope everyone listening to this knows, we'll be back here tomorrow night, talking about the exact, talking about tomorrow night's debate, so we'll cover it then. But I think for Joe Biden, the fear has got to be if he blows it again or even as perceived to have blown it, then that becomes the narrative. And I think that's when the polls actually start taking a dip. If he can't stand up to the pressure at two debates and a row, then what? Yeah, then there's a massive freakout among Democrats that how is he going to stand up to Trump, et cetera, et cetera. You can fill in the rest of that. Here's something you mentioned when we were sitting there watching the debate, which is the way Delaney and some of the

others, I think Steve Bullock probably falls in this category two, we're using talking points you could imagine going straight into the RNC press release or Trump's mouth about Medicare for all, saying things like, these people want to take away your insurance. Yeah. They're going to look at you. Not they have a different plan than I do, but they want to take away your private insurance. Language like that. What do you make of that happening tonight?

I go back to my, is this the hill you want to die on? Or your question from before. It seems like a really weird tack to take even if you're in desperate need of your campaign breaking out to make any, you know, to make any blip at all on the radar, right? I'm not sure why you would do that. I'm not sure why you would, I mean, it seems. It seems like they must know that they will be, if they get, if the blip is big enough for anyone to remember their name tomorrow, then they will be in Republican commercials necessarily, right? It's not just that they're using the same talking points. They will become the talking points. Like, Senator Warren here says this, but eight out of her, eight of her opponents say that, you know what? I mean, this is going to be a, this is going to be a talking point. Now, thankfully, right after I said that, Elizabeth Warren called them out on it, right? I mean, she said you were using Republican talking points. You don't need to do that here. She did.

And I think that, but I do think it's, I do think it's interesting. I think more than the actual political stance, and listen, you know, I think that the actual political stance is really important, but maybe even more than that, that shows their lack of vision. That shows the lack, that shows the lack of, the lack of seriousness or the lack of, just brightness of their campaign staff that someone thought that was a smart decision, not even on the politics. Like it just seems like that's not going to get you,

that's not going to get you anywhere in this primary. There were all these Delaney conspiracy theories going around Twitter tonight. One was, by the way, our most overused Twitter joke, which somehow united Jonathan Chaiton, J. Kang. Together again. Jonathan Chayton, Jay Kang was that John Delaney owns CNN, which is why he seemed to be on the air all night tonight, even though by the official New York Times rankings,

I'm showing him with the fourth lowest amount of airtime at 10 minutes and 31 seconds. That seems so unbelievable. He was on the screen so much. It shows him behind Klobuchar, which I just, I don't remember Klobuchar talking all that much. But yes, to that point, it did seem, and again, I'm not, this is not conspiracy, Brian and conspiracy David here late night in Brooklyn. But it did feel like he was doing exactly what CNN's producers wanted him to do. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. CNN's producers walked into that bait and said, we want to draw a contrast between Bernie and Warren and everybody else.

This is like, there's no Biden on stage tonight. There's no Harris. So we got to get these people to be the foils. The perfect foils. And they're not going anywhere, so they're going all in. And it was amazing the way he played that role. Now, again, if you're him, what are your incentives here? A lot of his staff, apparently his wife is running his presidential campaign.

You know, I said that to somebody. And I wanted to be clear, because this is going to be a knock either way. It's not his wife is running his presidential campaign. Like, the joke is that he can't. can't afford a campaign manager so his wife is doing it. No, the implication is that he is, like, his wife is like the puppet master of this campaign, that it's a vanity campaign that she, that has been her, her dream all along. And he wasn't listening to his staff. He was listening to her. This is John Delaney, who we said a couple of episodes ago on this podcast, whose staffers

had asked him to drop out. Yeah. Which is always a bad place to be. Yeah. But if your incentives, it was interesting, Alla Pundit, I think on Twitter said, what if John Delaney primary Trump. That's not a nutty idea, by the way. What if what if he just is okay, this Democratic thing has gone as far as it can go? Yeah. What if I drop out and kind of as a kind of in that, you know, have got kind of bill weld quality and run as a liberal Republican. I'm a business owner, I believe in incremental reforms to health care, all this stuff. I mean, that is kind of an interesting move. I sort of see him as like the Democrat, the quote unquote Democrat on Fox news coming up.

He's got a lot of paths from here. We are done with John Delaney probably on a national stage at this point, though he may get a nice little cable round of bookings after this. His incentives, though, are to go crazy tonight. Otherwise, he's just going to be forgotten. Otherwise, he's going to be Tim Ryan, which you're like, oh, hey, that guy's on stage again? Yeah.

What about him? I mean, the highlight of Tim Ryan's night was forgetting to put his hand on his heart for the national anthem, but the... Was that on purpose? No, I can't imagine. You pointed that out. We're watching all nine candidates have their hand in their heart. And I almost thought like, oh, wow, are we doing this?

Are we doing a Kaepernick thing here? Him and Marianne Williams didn't have their hands in their heart at the beginning. I think it's because they were at the very end of the row, you know, and it was like it was incumbent on Tim Ryan to put his hand up so Marianne would know to do it. And then Tim just failed to do it all together. Anyway, setting that aside. Back to Delaney. Yeah, I think that I feel like he made, it sure felt tonight like he made.

Like he made the decision that many like reality show contestants have made before him, which was like the only way anyone's going to remember my name a month from now is if I played the villain. Like I'm going to embrace this role. Yeah. I didn't come into this thinking that my economic, my, you know, my moderate economic ideals made me a bad guy. But now that I realize that they do, I'm going to embrace it. He's like that guy on The Bachelor of his name, I thankfully have already forgotten. One of the Luke's?

Was it a Luke? I don't know. He's the Luke. of this. I think you're absolutely right. And I think you'll, by the way, if you know you're not going to be president, you lean into that. Yeah.

Because that, it gives you a lane at the risk of using the word lane. It gives you a lane of being kind of a troll. But again, with who's probably not saying anything he doesn't believe, but you sort of lean into it. That becomes your identity. Well, worst case scenario is you, like you said, you get a bunch of Fox bookings. Best case scenario, you looked at as an Oracle four years from now. if the tides don't go the Democrats way.

That's true. He started off in his opening statement, by the way, saying, you know, when we nominate a big liberal, a big lefty, we always lose. And he named check like Walter Mondale. I think that would be news to Walter Mondale. Yeah. That he's like, he's a raging laugh. Or even Michael Dukakis, who we named after that. The second thing I think today, David, after the Democrats sort of wondered aloud about who they were going to nominate for president was something that's been happening in the polls.

Benji Sarlane of NBC tweeted this, and I think this is exactly right, is the polls at the top of the Democratic primary have been remarkably stable. There is a, we've seen, we've seen Sanders sort of drift down a little bit. We saw Harris drift up after the last debate. We've seen Biden go down, then up again, Warren on a steady trajectory up. But the top tier seems pretty stable. And I think what you saw tonight is the farewell appearance of a bunch of one percenters. This will be their last big national moment. What?

And the top tier, at least after one round of this, I think staying fairly stable. Yeah, I mean, I said you, back when we were watching this, that I think, you know, you have to look at the people on stage tonight. Beto O'Rourke is probably the top of the second tier, right? I mean, if you put Buttigieg in the top, then, then, you know, right below that, you would put Beto. And I can't imagine anyone with a straight face drawing out Beto's path to victory, even this far out. I mean, maybe anything could happen. But after tonight, even that seems impractical note. Heaven forbid anybody, you try to draw that path for anybody below him.

I mean, I guess there's going to be, I guess you could. There's still this hope, though. You see it all that everybody's. With Beto or just in general? With Beto. Because you know, I've talked about how he's this kind of like, he's almost like a tech company. I think we compared him to a podcast one time. He's sort of like a pot.

But everybody's like, well, you know, what if Beto goes viral tonight? Yeah, no, I've got to. Van Jones said, like, what if he goes viral on the, on the race. stuff tonight. I've got two new Beto takes. One, and both of them are jokes. One is that Beto looks like an S&L cast member playing a president. I'm not sure which president, but like, I'm not even sure his hair is really gray. It just looks sort of at all kind of is put on. My other one is that, and this is maybe something that he, you know, as a Texan is very familiar with, he's like a, he's like a internet celebrity quality youth group minister.

the way he just sort of like he talks in a way that makes you think he knows he's talking down to you but he's doing it politely and energetically and with enough energy yeah bringing you in yeah enough enough in like yeah

there's some inertia in the in his lack of movement I just don't see it just hasn't caught on it hasn't caught on tonight to say the least tonight he had some room to swing and it just seems like

he does he And he just formally rebooted. Yeah. There's that moment where everybody's going to reboot sooner or later. He went back to the dusty border town of El Paso, Texas. Yeah. And rebooted. And this was,

I thought he was, by the way, he was better tonight. Sure. He was much better than he was in round one. The problem was he kind of delivered like, if he were a front runner, that would have been a good performance.

Exactly. He was debating like a boxer hasn't thrown a punch the whole fight, but thinks he's up on point somehow. Like he doesn't know, he just doesn't know where he is, it seems. He has this strange. confidence.

Yeah. It's a strange confidence in the power of Beto. Yeah. Let me talk to you about some other candidates who I think will begin to fade a little bit after this or at least not have the same high profile debate platform, perhaps. Amy Klobuchar. She had kind of an interesting night. I think what was interesting about her is she had a chance to play the Delaney role.

She had a chance to be the swinging moderate. And when they teed her up and said, well, you said something about people with ideas that aren't going to work, she passed. She pulled a punch. She doesn't, yeah, she's not, she would not allow herself to be the villain. And I think that's, that's the difference between those two things. Now, she has a, she has a more viable

candidacy, I guess, than, then Delaney or some of the other people on stage. But I think whatever, I think the viability is, I mean, that's gone after tonight. But she, she, she, by not, by not punching, and I agree, she, that's not her nature. But by not doing that, she lost an opportunity to draw

any kind of contrast. That's, that's, that's, That's correct. So I came away thinking, wait, she was on stage that much? It just all faded away from me. I just got the impression with her throughout the night that every time that she spoke, she thought she was making, she thought she was hitting it out of the ballpark. You know, she,

I mean, she had a couple of moments that a little swell was coming, but it read like she and her writers or campaign staff, whatever. They jotted this down on paper, and they high fived, and they were like, we're going to get them, and then just none of it played, and they should have known better. Yeah, a lot of iron rain. talk. My dad was a journalist. My dad, my dad, my grandfather was this. This is my, this is my clobachar, the only quote that I wrote down. Yes, I have bold ideas, but they are grounded in

reality. I don't know if that's an exact quote or a paraphrase, but that was like, that was a big, that was a big moment for her. That did that get tweeted as much as the Warren quote got tweeted. We were introduced today, tonight, David, to Steve Bullock for Montana. Oh, my gosh. I felt he had a little bit of a Phil Hartman quality. We always talk about this. We've never heard these people speak. No. I'm sorry, I've never heard Steve Bullock speak. I started off, I started off thinking Nick Saban, and then by the end, I was just referring to him and a text message chain as Governor Longmire, so I have no idea. I don't really know. He had a cut, he was a, he was a manifold personality, but it was, he's definitely a character, man. It's interesting you say Sabin,

uh, Jacko of the extended, uh, Ringer universe that Bullock reminds me of a college football coach. Yeah. On Twitter. He had a few, uh, weird. moments where he said we need to get back to nuclear proliferation. That was a that was a little bit of a strange take. If I talk about radical ideas, we need to proliferate these nuclear weapons. What did he say proliferage? It was a great, it was a George W. Bush level like Ms. Noah. He also said nuclear, by the way.

Elizabeth Warren, when he said that Elizabeth Warren said, what? And then he had to go back and change himself up a little bit. The other one I wanted to talk to you about was Buttigieg. Okay. Who is right there at the bottom of the top tier. Yeah. Or the top of the second tier, maybe. I think he's going to sort of accept, I mean, he's going to be honorary member of the top tier until, at least for the foreseeable future.

He to me had the Beto debate we're talking about. He just starts at a higher point. He, every debate he has is kind of a frontrunner's debate. Yeah. I'm going to be real sensible. I'm going to come in. I'm going to do my bit about the age when he said, well, you know, I was. a junior in high school when the Columbine massacre happened.

I don't know if he saw Amy Klobuchar's face, but she had this incredible smirk. Like, oh, here we get. Here comes the part where he reminds us that he's really young. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I thought he had a good debate. There was a point midway through where, you know, I had him as like a clear cut top three debate. And then it seemed like they kind of, the moderators went to him a little bit less for a little

while. And then he kept when he popped back up. And then you and I were both like, oh, wait, where has he been? he makes great use of all of his time and I don't want to be dismissive because of his age. He is younger than me, I guess, which is a little bit,

that's definitely the first time this has happened in my last time. No, I mean, but I do think that his, I think he made the point in a previous debate or at least in a previous interview that they, that, you know, no one should hold his age against him and no one should hold Bernie's against him and, you know, we should,

we should just, you know, make our decisions based on the merits. And I think that that's really true. I think that even if there's a, even if there's a rational argument, about age in either direction, I think it just gets like totally subsumed under this just like irrational argument, like just gatekeeping

argument. But all that aside, I couldn't help but think that he would make a really incredible press secretary for a great president. Or he would be, or he would just make. Like in the Aaron Sorkin show about a great president? Yes, exactly.

Like a chief of staff slash press. Someone who's out there like giving it advice to the president but also out there as a mouthpiece for the president because he's an incredible speaker. I'm not quite sure at this point in his career, he's an incredible leader of men or of humans. I'm not quite sure that he's the inspirational kind of field general

that we're all looking for in this role. But hell, I mean, who is at this point? I don't know. Another farewell, David, Tim Ryan, who said at the end of the debate, I hope tonight I captured your imagination. How many hands do you think went up across America when he said that?

Oh, my gosh. Whose imagination was captured by Tim Ryan tonight. A couple other lines I wrote down. He was talking about immigration. He said, if we want to come into the country, you should at least bring the doorbell. Bring the doorbell. I really, like, I think he was expecting a ring the doorbell chant

to just erupt through Detroit. I'm not sure that that was going to work. That was good one. He was also talking to the hypothetical voter out there and said, it's going to be you and me. It's going to be us. And then he said something about it's going to be, He worked like a misuse of you and I in there, too,

and he should have been you and me at some point later on. The one thing that I will give him tonight is that during the very beginning when everybody was coming out on stage, he was the first candidate to not walk across shaking everybody. He ended the awkward tyranny of handshakes that was permeating the introductions. And I'm grateful to him for that. But after that point, it was all I could have done without him. And finally, really a heart-rending goodbye to Marianne Williamson.

I thought she started slow by her admittedly high standards tonight. I thought she ended strong though. Am I crazy? Oh, she did. Okay. So you were going to say that? And it was on race. Yeah.

Where I think she delivered a couple of answers. One was on reparations. And the other was sort of a general answer about race. It started out what she was talking about Flint, Michigan. Where I thought you could almost lift those answers and put them into a Democratic, here's how to talk about this stuff. manual. Alex Perrine, I think, did a piece in the New Republic recently about taking her seriously.

Uh-huh. Because there is something, there is something to what she's saying about, there's a larger psychic energy here and a larger way of talking about this. That's not just getting into the weeds of policy. And she's not, she's not totally wrong about that. No. And when she talks about, when she talked about race, she may have been the most effective person on stage period.

Yeah. I would think anybody voting for a president on either side of the aisle is hoping for a candidate that's aspirational enough to get away with saying the kind of thing that Marianne Williamson was saying on stage tonight, right? Like, I don't know if you could take those words and put him into the mouths of anybody else that was standing up there. But, you know, Barack Obama could probably get away with a lot of the stuff, she said. Sure. He could make it sing. And she was making it sing. It's, by the end of the night, I was surprised with how checked in I was when she was.

was speaking and not just on an ironic level. She had a good night. I don't know what this amounts to, but I mean, she's made it this far. It's a great compliment to her that, you know, people are, that we're having this conversation. Can we talk a little bit about CNN? We complained last time about MSNBC. So now it's time to complain about CNN. I thought the speed of the first half of the debate was really strange.

The CNN moderators had obviously decided we are going to, we're going to run this show. If we say 30 seconds, we are cutting you off and if you're right in the middle of your point. Yeah. If we say 15 seconds, we're cutting you off. Which is not enough time to take a breath, barely. It gave the, and they were talking about the complicated stuff. They were talking about Medicare for all on immigration in the first part of that debate. I saw Nick Confessori at the time say, it's just really hard to follow what's going on.

Yeah. And I think your average voter who has, you know, watched some of this stuff but has not really plugged in, he was saying, and I agree, I'm not sure you could follow the immigration stuff without the candidates being able to talk a little bit more and being drawn out a little bit more. Yeah, I think that actually, I mean, I don't know if this is meaningful at all, but I wonder if you go back and look at the minutes, the amount of time that each candidate got to speak. I bet a lot of the discrepancy is going to be, you know, from our perception to what the reality is based in how far some of the candidates pushed back against the CNN moderators, right? I mean, John Delaney would just like just close his briefcase every time that CNN people said a word. You know, he was just like, that's fine, I'm done, although it seemed like he was talking a lot. But yeah, CNN was, I don't know. know, I bet if you watch this, if you came down from outer space and watched this debate, or that's not even the right way to put it, if you woke up from cryogenic freeze and watched this debate,

it probably would feel kind of like a regular debate. I mean, it felt like, this felt very normal in a lot of ways. Presentation, tempo, I mean, not tempo, but temperature. But it was, it was, a lot of very deliberate decisions were made. And it did overall feel subject matter-wise,

timing wise like you said it did it did it felt at its core deeply weird and I don't know exactly know how to put my finger on it there is this theory and there and it was repeated coming out of the MSNBC debate that the candidates were interrupting too much and that that privileged male candidates because they could just essentially scream into the microphone and go

I'd like to make a point I'd like to make a point I'd like to make a point and wind up sort of eating up more airtime than their competitors and I think there's something to that I don't think candidates interrupting was the problem with the NBC debate. No. And I think what it did, I saw Connie Schultz, who's a long-time journalist

and also married to the U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, said these mandatory 15-second responses make a mockery of what is at stake here. Yeah, it's true. This is supposed to be a debate for the future of our country, not a game show. Well, speaking of game shows, I was semi-seriously agitating halfway through the debate that they should have just been eliminating somebody from the stage every 10 minutes,

just like let the audience decide. But if you want to take a real, if you want to have a real conversation about reformatting these debates, let people have as much time as they want to rebut, but just give them a set amount of total time to talk.

And when they're done, they sit down. So the last five minutes or the people, the last 30 minutes of the debate are the people who wisely saved their time. Ooh, I like that. I mean, how hard is that? Just like, it's like a soccer game. Just keep track of the amount of time that's elapsed.

So you have like, you have like a bank of 12 minutes. Sure. And you can, so if I'm like. How many people are on, stage tonight, 10? So, there's a lot of minutes in tonight's debate. Senator Curtis may want to be really present during Medicare and immigration. Yeah. But then we get like into the fourth topic and it's something and I'm just going to sit this one out. Yeah. The problem is when a lot of people

sit it out. I think you have to answer the question that's given you, but they keep track of the rebuttals and the responses and everything. This starts to sound like the NFL 18 game schedule. Everybody only gets to play 16 games. Yeah. Yeah. To play your backup quarterback twice. Listen, it's all good in theory, but then you actually have to pass it in the collective bargaining agreement. I saw tweets from two. Two people who are, I believe not ideological fellow travelers, Tim Miller, who writes for the bulwark and Libby Watson of Splinter, I think I could safely say they are not agreeing on much. But they did have the same thought, which is, why is the Democratic Party agreeing to let cable news channels run their debates? We are just at the end of the television era, somewhere near the end of the television era.

Sure. So if you want to get the maximum audience, but at some point, don't you just go to Twitter tech company and say, we want to run this. We're going to set the rules. We're going to pick the moderators. We're not going to let CNN turn it into a weird content fest.

Yeah. And then you can put it on a channel you want for free. Yeah. We'll just PBS, C-SPAN, the networks, but you have to show our debate. Why at this point, Seed control. And again, I'm, I am pro journalists generally. Why seed control to a cable network at this point? I totally agree. I don't, I think CNN did a much better job than MSNBC overall. And technical glitches, even aside, I do, I feel like the, there were a lot of similar lines of questioning. And, you know, maybe rightly or wrongly, I accused NBC of Chuck Todd in particular of sort of asking these like bad faith questions to try to, you know, drive.

try to divide the people on the stage. I feel like a lot of those same questions were asked, but I couldn't help, I couldn't help but think when you're talking about, like, oh, so-and-so called your plan, you know, I mean, someone-so-called your plan, unrealistic, Senator Warren, what do you have to say? And then go back to the person.

Senator Warren has called you, has called you in a question on what you said, what do you have to say? It's just like, so many of these issues, the difference, and I know we have to, like, there's a lot of these issues that really matter. But the differences, even if they're not low stakes, are so clearly spelled out on everybody's campaign websites. Like, we, like, so little was gleaned from the wedges they were trying to insert between candidates tonight. You know, I mean, sure, there's the case that if you want, D&C, if they wanted to run their own debate, you could go in a lot of different directions.

You know, you could say, like, you know, everybody just make your most sweeping speech because that's how someone's going to get elected is to, is to capture the imagination of the country, right? I mean, you could go in that way. You get really in the nitty-gritty details and get the most like, the most like, you know, egg-headed lefty bloggers to like drill people down on the details and see what they really know. There's a lot of ways you could go that's not just looking for sound bites on, again, ground we have what we have trod over a million times. They turned it into a cable news show, didn't they? Exactly. This was crossfire the debate with a lot of, a lot more people firing. They weren't worried that it was a substantive conversation. They were worried that person, X says this and then oppositional person Y says something. And then we go to oppositional person Z says something.

And then it kind of, it's like one of those CNN shows with 12 people on the same. Exactly what I was thinking of. It has Jeffrey Tupid and the guy who looks like Jeffrey Tupin. Remember that guy? Yes. He's probably talking on TV right now. I'm sure fake Jeffrey Tuben is around somewhere. No, but I, yeah.

I mean, and what better people to be moderating than the people who do that every day? I mean, maybe that's why they were so adept at, you know, cutting somebody off after 15 seconds. because Jake Tapper does that for a living. But I don't want to turn this into a cable news show. I don't want, we don't watch cable news. We don't watch those shows. Yeah. So we don't want the debate.

We don't want to accidentally watch those through a debate in the form of a debate. Yeah. But it was true that they, I mean, that they did give, I mean, you can, you can extend this metaphor quite far, just the degree to which they dealt with the Delaney's and Hickenloopers with credulity that was probably unearned for the sake of debate. Right. I mean, the whole thing was very, the whole thing was, it was, it was, there was a lot of put on aspect to it. That's how, that's what you do with rando pundits. Right. And if they choose scenery, they become sort of less rando in your pundit universe.

That's what they did with Delaney. Yeah. I'll tell you the part that was abjectly terrible tonight was the beginning of the debate. Go on. First of all, the debate, the debate itself began at the 25 minute mark. So eight o'clock Eastern, we get this long package where, you know, everybody is being introduced one by one, and even randos like Bullock and, you know, Hick and and Looper, they say putting Heartland values on display. We have to introduce in a big, produced

voice over all the candidates. Then they come out and we have to introduce them again one by one and they walk on the stage. Right. Then we had this national anthem. Right. By the way, can I interrupt real quick? To introduce these people one by one as if anyone who wasn't, as if everyone who's watching this debate did not have to Google their names 500 times even after those introductions. Everybody watching this debate at home had a, had an image, they had

Google image searched CNN debate night one candidates to get their names in their head. I just want to say, oh, totally. They were introduced in a package, they were introduced on stage, and then they made an opening statement. Yeah. You don't need to introduce somebody three times.

No. That's not necessary. Yeah. Between their introduction on stage and the opening statement, David, was a performance at the national anthem. Now, I know it's late, so just cut this part of the pot if we're going off script here.

This is when Brian gets fired. This is like at a baseball game. We don't need the national anthem. We need the national anthem, but every sporting event? No, we don't need it at the debate. They don't, they didn't, did they do that at the Hillary Trump debates? I don't remember them. Now let's take time to do the national anthem.

This is CNN just hoping against hope that Bernie Sanders would take a need during the national anthem. They just wanted some... Tim Ryan did it. He did. He did it. Did you notice how the core... They had the kind of choral rendition of the National Anthem?

And the candidates were desperately trying to kind of mouth along with the lyrics. But it was hard because it was a chorus. It wasn't just one... It wasn't like a recording like you get at the ballpark. So you saw, I think it was Hicken Looper, who was the only one who was kind of a round on along with the... Yeah. Yeah, I would have given anything for, like, Amy Klobuchar to have done like the one... Like the two fingers on one ear and the other hand with a finger pointed aloft, like bathroom sing along to it?

She would have gotten my vote if she had done that. We don't need that. And we don't need generic anchor intro of the debate. No. Like Dan Abash, Jake Tapper, Don Lemon, all standing out there and all saying something like, this is a debate. It's about to happen. The debate can just happen. So in Brian and David's dream debate, here's what happens.

A voiceover says, time for the Democratic debate to start. we come out, everybody's already on stage. We introduce the moderators very briefly. And then they turn and say, all right, the first question is to Elizabeth Warren. There we go. Yeah. We just, we just, I just cut 25 minutes. It's like an editor.

Great piece. Now watch me cut your lead. They got a commercial break in. They got a commercial break in. That was incredible. Yeah. Like before the debate even started, there was a commercial break, which is great because they didn't have one for a long time, which is, again, I'm not quite sure.

the decision-making process is there. But it worked out for the network. I felt at some point, like, it was the, you know, when you sit down on Super Bowl Sunday and then you have to Google what time does the Super Bowl start because it's clear it's not starting anytime soon. It's always an odd time like 507. And thank God, heavy.com is there to answer the question for you. But, yeah, this was, I would have, it would have been great if I had known that I could

have showed up at 825 tonight. I put this on Twitter, but people always compare politics TV and sports TV. They say politics TV is becoming sports TV. Remindered that sports TV is rarely this badly produced Sports TV would just start There was an hour pregame show Remember before all that stuff I mentioned The 25 minutes of non-content

Sports TV would be more exciting We're just gonna go right to it Yeah We're not gonna pad this When we turn on the TV tonight Tom Perez was doing a one-man show Live on CNN Why was that televised?

I have no idea And CNN has like other subsidiaries They could put this on anyway I mean as useless as a pregame show is listening to Tom Perez Fire Up Democrats. I don't really get that. One note, Dave, before we go, it's getting late. I noticed this during the debate, and a couple of people made fun of it.

A candidate would have a good line. And then the candidate's web team would tweet out the line like 30 seconds later. First of all, let's give credit to the best line of the night. If not for that Elizabeth Warren one, then to Bernie Sanders for his, do you want to play that right real quick? Yeah, let's hear it. Second of all. You don't know that, Bernie. I do a second conversation.

I do know when I wrote the damn bill. That was a, if Bernie Sanders had walked off at that point and just be like, I can't debate these fuckwits. Let's have a town hall. That would have been fine by me. Oh, absolutely. And just left. We'll see you later on. What a walkoff. That would have been incredible.

That would have been incredible. But I like how it's just turned into, in case you, in case you were under the suspicion that these candidates hadn't rehearsed some of these lines. Yeah. That they weren't, that these hadn't been gone through several times. There's not spontaneous lines in the moment of the debate. Their web team stood ready. I mean, the Kamala Harris one about busing where they immediately put up the picture of hers a little girl right after she was like, well, I think we knew this was coming. That's funny.

And I think we saw that Bernie Sanders is already selling. I wrote the damn bill bumper stickers. Did Tim Ryan's Twitter account and his campaign Twitter account put out a thing when he said, I think President Trump was on to something? I think that was his quote of. That's not a bumper statement. That's not going to get any votes in the Democratic primary. That's too bad. On the way out, can we hear a little bit of Governor John Hickenlooper playing the banjo?

Oh, what a good way to say goodbye to John Hickenlober. He's David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Our producer is Jim Cunningham. We're back tomorrow night. Wednesday night was second with the second round of the Democratic debates. More lukewarm takes about the media and the future of our country. See then, David.

See you later, Brian.