The Press Box - Night Two Debate Reactions | The Press Box

Episode Date: June 28, 2019

Harris stuns Biden, Bernie and Buttigieg hit their marks, and more observations from the second night of the Democratic presidential primary debates.  Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, I've had a dream that we've done this all before. We've had a, we, you and I have sat right next to each other. Oh, man. And had a debate reaction show just like this. What was going on with the whole Chuck Todd, Rachel Maddell thing tonight? I don't know, but I can tell that they're great buddies. Yeah, totally sincerely, right? They have effectively, they've effectively campaigned and made me believe in their friendship.

Yeah, they feel like running mates at this point. Yeah, exactly. Where they kind of stare. And I'm so proud to introduce my good friend and a tireless ally of the people, Chuck Todd. They both have a lot to gain from the endorsement of the other. Let's get this going. We are the cable news, buddy cop movie of media podcasts. This is the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network.

Woo! Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer here with your Insta reactions to night two. Of the Democratic debates, which ended just moments ago. And David, there is no place we can start other than the moment of the night. Senator Kamala Harris of California confronts the former Vice President Joe Biden on his record on race. Let's listen to Harris. I do not believe you are a racist. And I agree with you when you commit yourself to the importance of finding common ground.

But I also believe, and it's personal. And it was actually very, it was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country. And it was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing. And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public school. schools and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me. So let's talk about why that moment was so powerful, David. I thought Kamala Harris did a really effective job all night of putting emotion into her points. Yeah. Almost everything she said. There you could hear the pain in her voice. She didn't just put emotion into it. She put herself into the point. And, you know,

it was it was not only an effective point scoring debate moment of the evening, but it was an intensely personal one, didn't you think so? Yeah, I thought she had a standout night. You know, we'll go candidate by candidate in a little bit, but I think it'd be hard to put anybody ahead of her as far as having one the night. And I think that, you know, there are substantive issues where someone or a candidate, in her, in her role, record that she will have to address and she really didn't tonight. I thought that she was an incredibly effective speaker, an incredibly effective advocate for herself and for her platform. And because of the format or because of the kind of her unexpected emergence, no one on stage

was even remotely equipped to kind of clap back at her. Yeah, but, you know, I think even before we get to that, it's no one seemed to be really ready to clap back at Joe Biden. Yeah. Who we've talked about has had two weeks of moments, whether it's on the Hyde Amendment, whether it's on these comments he made about segregationist Democratic senators, that nobody, now maybe Harris took it off the table. But there was not a line to get to Biden on that issue, which was kind of surprising to me. I think we went to this debate thinking Joe Biden is the frontrunner. People are going to take shots. And he has drawn up the game plan over the last week or two. in terms of how they're supposed to do it.

Sure. But she was the one who stepped up and did it tonight and, of course, was the most effective messenger. I think that you're right that she took it off the table. And I also think that there was an element. I mean, there were a lot of people on stage who were introducing themselves to the country. And we talked about that.

You know, we talked about that last night. So I think that they were more interested in their own presentation than anything with Joe Biden. And I also think for some, there was probably a political calculation that Joe Biden was doing himself in. He was doing more damage to his own campaign than they could do.

by like staring down a man who was still immensely popular, right? And just get out of the way. Just get out of the way and let him just, you know, he cut himself off two or three times tonight. I mean, it's just his presentation was, I mean, his whole, his entire night was just kind of mind boggling. So Harris hits Biden on his comments about segregation of senator. She makes the busing point intensely personal. Let's let that clip roll to see how Biden responded. Vice President Biden.

It's a mischaracterization. across the board. I did not praise racist. That is not true. Number one, number two, if we want to have this campaign litigated on who supports civil rights and whether I did or not, I'm happy to do that. I was a public defender. I didn't become a prosecutor. I came out, I left a good law firm to become a public defender when in fact, when in fact my city was in flames because of the assassination of Dr. King. Number one. Number two, as the U.S. as, excuse me, as, excuse me, As the Vice President of the United States, I work with a man who, in fact, we worked very hard to see to it we dealt with these issues in a major, major way.

The fact is that in terms of busing, the busing, I never, you would have been able to go to school the same exact way because it was a local decision made by your city council. That's fine. That's one of the things I argued for, that we should not be, we should be breaking down these lines. But so the bottom line here is, look, everything I've done in my career, I've done in my career, I ran because of civil rights. I continue to think we have to make fundamental changes in civil rights.

And those civil rights, by the way, include not just only African-Americans, but the LGBT community. I think that's reasonably effective pairing by Biden. He gets the shot in saying, I wasn't a prosecutor. I was a public defender. Being a prosecutor has been something that has complicated Kamala Harris' message in the Democratic primary so far. But, you know, he took a big shot. he seemed at that point to be still on his feet in boxing terms. What would you make of his response?

I mean, I think that calling Kamala Harris a cop was, I mean, an effective attack line. I don't know that it really did anything to deflect what she had said. And I mean, I think that it was effective. It was probably the right choice politically for him to respond in kind rather than to just sort of apologize for the misconception, you know, for what he had said. it at least kind of signal a little bit of vitality on his part, a little bit of, you know, interest in the issue. Is this where he gets in trouble for not apologizing? If he had just come out and said, I'm sorry, I was talking about working with other people,

I would never, you know, I would never praise senators because they were segregationists. He had tried to put this issue to bed a week ago. Wouldn't this have headed off this attack? attack to some to some extent? Well, he seems incapable of straightforwardly apologizing for anything. Which is the point, right? Yeah. This is the downside of the no apology strategy.

At least he made an affirmative decision. I mean, and that's something of it. I think that he got, and this was, I'm sure, deliberate move on Harris's part. He got trapped in this discussion about busing, which, you know, some people will say that he was actually on the right side of the issue at the time. I mean, that's it. But the whole point is that this is, you know, this is a getting him trapped in the weeds. of trying to defend his record on something that happened that long ago is a pretty effective tactic

because he can't just say, well, you're wrong about that. He can't say, go to my website and find out why I'm right. He has to discuss this thing that it's like she's forcing him to have a boring conversation. And he's the one that's coming off seeming just out of touch and dull. He said, I thought he started off the debate relatively strong. He was hit with his comment, yet another comment he made at that fundraiser about nothing. will fundamentally change. Oh, yeah. It wasn't really held to account. I was just able to reel off a whole bunch of red meat about Donald Trump and then the moderators moved on. At the beginning of debate, I was reminded of what an effective debater he was against Paul Ryan and Sarah Palin. He was just

singing the same thing. He won those debates going away. It was really, really effective. And I thought, wow, this is, here's a guy who's locked in, who is prepared for tonight, who understands what's going on. Well, as the debate unfolded, a couple of things happened. One, he started fish tailing all over place verbally. Really bizarre. It sounded like you and I trying to host a podcast. And part of that was weirdly for reasons I cannot fathom, respecting the moderator's 60-second rule to the second.

It was the debate version of Hold Me Back when you start a fight with somebody just because you know your friends are there to pull you apart. He was just like asking them to stop him halfway through a discussion, halfway through an answer. And not to overdo the boxing analogy, but it just felt like, look. looking to the ref, like the round's over, right? Yeah. The rounds, we can get out, I can go sit on my stool and recover, right?

Yeah. I love the technique of I have three points. I have three things to say about this to kind of say one of them and then just be like, now you want me to stop, right? Meanwhile, like Kamala Harris and many others, but Kamala Harris, I think most notably tonight, was just bulldozing through all of the, you must stop talking now notes from the, from the moderators, right? I mean, she was just.

She definitely was. And effectively, too, right? I mean, she managed to, I think as we start weighing, you know, who's going to be able to go toe to toe to with Trump, I think that I'm not saying that Rachel Maddow is or Chuck Todd as a stand in for President Trump. But she did seem to effectively kind of have her way with the format. Yeah, that was a tweet from Dave Weigel. He said one reason that Kamala exchange with Biden matters, dim voters need to be convinced that a woman can face Trump on stage and take him apart. That moment got her a long way. Yeah. The Biden did not sound like a candidate who has been through a lifetime of political debates, nor a vice president who's been through years and years of giant high wattage political debates. No, I mean, that, the debater from the past two campaign, or the, the two Obama campaigns was,

I mean, you're right, you could see a glint of that in his eye at the beginning, but it was, you know, by about 20 minutes in, that was nowhere to be found me. That was a distant memory. And he, he, I mean, there was a, there was a tweet that came late in the, the debate from Olivia Nuzzi saying the source close to the Biden campaign says his staff is quote freaking out about his performance. I think it's safe to say that he did not do anything to help himself and help his campaign tonight. And I think that, you know, we're going to see a lot of sort of reversion to the mean for a lot of these candidates. And I think that his boost was a little

bit artificial. You know, there's some people that are, there's some people that like we discussed with Cory Booker last night and we're kind of like, why was he not? Why was he not a front run? Why was he not considered a top tier candidate? And Kamala Harris, who has often considered, has often been considered a top tier candidate, but hasn't always pulled like one or been presented like one through all forms of media, certainly asserted herself as one tonight. Meanwhile, Biden just sort of, he didn't feel like, he didn't feel like the sure thing. He didn't feel like the given. He didn't feel like Hillary Clinton four years ago. We've been waiting to see we, meaning us as journalists, and then I think also all the Democratic candidates, have been

waiting to see Biden's vulnerability. First thing. we saw tonight was performative vulnerability. He looks like a... Every man can understand him. He looks like a dazed candidate up there. He looks dazed. He looks unsure of himself. He doesn't always do it.

That's performative. Now, the second part of this, which let's not forget is, every time we have one of these Biden snafus over the over two weeks, political Twitter steps up and says, here we go. Here we go. Frontrunner status is going to crumble. He's going to, he's going to come back to the pack a little bit. and his poll numbers don't move.

So the second part of this, I think when we talk about Biden suddenly being vulnerable is what's going to happen to the polls over the next week or two? Yeah. Is he really going, is this, you know, our Democratic voters really, is this going to get through? We know his voters tend to be older. We know his constituency tends to probably be people that aren't moved in quite the same way by daily events, or at least it haven't been so far. So will tonight and maybe some of the attacks that come out of tonight really move them? It's a great question. I think inevitability is a blessing and a curse.

And I think that if the perception tomorrow morning is that he is no longer inevitable, then we'll see his numbers change a whole lot. Do we want to run a little bit more of that exchange? Because Harris then held him to account on busing. Let's listen to Harris continuing to roast Biden on buss. But Vice President Biden, do you agree to that? Do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America then? Do you agree?

I did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That's what I oppose. Well, there was a failure of states to integrate public schools in America. I was part of the second class to integrate Berkeley, California public schools almost two decades after Brown v. Board of Education. Because your city council made that decision. It was a local decision. So that's where the federal government must step in.

That's why we have the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. That's why we need to pass the ERA. You see what she's doing there. Biden is not apologizing again. He's trying to parry and say, no, no, no, I wasn't against busing. I was just against federal versus local ordering of busing. And then Harris debating quite well says that's exactly what I'm talking about. civil rights in this case should be a federal issue.

I am talking about there are moments when the federal government needs to step up and say, yes, you need to bust these students to integrate these schools. Yeah. I mean, the expectations obviously should have been in Harris's favor, given that, you know, this is, debates have always been a strong, one of her strong suits. Biden's performance in the opposite direction is a little bit shocking, I guess. I do want to point out that not everybody agrees with, with our take. Francesa tweeted that Biden should have just looked right, look left, and then said,

call me when the tryouts are over. Is he in the spin room? I have no idea. Is he in the basement of a spin room? Frances is that a big day. He has. I did not know he was a Biden surrogate or even a Biden fan. Because he's a Trump guy, wasn't he?

Yeah. Yeah. I just think that he's a surrogate for, you know, white men of a certain demographic. Let's talk about Harris's night overall. a couple of moments for her. One is she was asked about how Democrats were going to pay for all these policies that they've been proposing. And she turned the question around and said, why aren't Republicans asked the same question when they fund a big tax cut? Yeah.

I thought that was a big moment. She had that real cutting through moment when she talked about, you know, everybody's arguing. And she sort of came at that line as like, we shouldn't be having a food fight. We should be talking about putting food on the table, which was a can. line, but I thought at the moment for the gender dynamics on stage. Your mileage may vary on that one. I thought it was, I thought it was effective because early in the debate, you have all these dudes arguing with each other and she got through it very, very well.

She tried to personalize everything. She talked, as I said about, you know, when she talked about deportation, she says, what about a rape victim who happens to be an immigrant? I want to make it so that that woman can flag down a police officer. She talked about, you know, a person, when the hospital doors, once they walk through the hospital doors, they have to pay $5,000 in co-pay, even if they have insurance. She also used the line, release children from cages. When I'm present, I'm going to release children from cages to a big cheer from the audience. That's an incredibly effective line. It cuts through

this immigration debate. You know, we've been talking about kids and cages and all these things. But to me, that is a, you can imagine that as a stump line, whoever is the candidate that takes you all the way to November 2020. I just thought she just, I thought just thought rhetorically she was very, very impressive tonight. She closed the night with the concept of the 3-A.M agenda, which as you pointed out, was kind of bizarrely evocative of the Hillary Clinton. 2008 Hillary Clinton. Yeah.

The 3-A.m. phone call. Yeah, that was a strange one. It was a good, I thought that, I think the 3-Am agenda is a good idea, but I think that that connotation, that correlation is going to be a little bit of a weird when to get over. But I think you're right. I think overall, you know, again, at the, expensive being too horse racier, too meta about this. I mean,

Harris won the night. Now what remains, now she, I mean, starting tomorrow, she's going to be treated like a frontrunner. And she's got to be now this good every day doing every element of the campaign and not just getting up on stage and arguing with people. That sounded dismissive, but not just getting it, not, your chance to be better than just a good

debater. Her campaign so far has been really interesting. She had that big crowd in Oakland and big fundraising when she announced. And then she went through this kind of period where she struggled with some of her answers. Her staff felt that she was trying too much to appease lefty elements in the party. Yeah. She was, I think, the first candidate to officially reboot beating Better O'Rourke to the reboot stage by a few days. By the way, if we had Cousin Salon right now, I would, you know, I'm taking out my wallet for the Biden reboot story. It's going to emerge over the next 48 hours.

is Biden the huddle with advisors? How do we capture Uncle Joe's old magic? How does Biden promise to actually prepare for debates instead of going through and winging it? How does he finally come up with answers and all the stuff? That story will be out in 48 hours. Everything in my wallet, everything in my children's college fund on that story. I think you're right on that.

Biden, I thought had an interesting night. I actually thought he started quite well, as I said, when he was talking about Obamacare and health care, there was a little bit of an argument about Medicare for all versus building on Obamacare in a much more incremental way. Biden, who has the more incrementalist approach,

cited his wife's death. He cited his son's terminal cancer. And really personalized his answer quite well, I thought. He, the interesting thing about Biden is he hasn't given many interviews in this campaign. Yeah. And a lot of people wrote before this, this is going to be the first time Joe Biden is really pushed on all these issues.

As soon as Harris pushed, now he was fish tailing way before that, that whole weird answer about jailing health care executives when he seemed to be trying to talk like Bernie Sanders and couldn't quite get the words out. But then once Harris pushed him, as we saw, he wasn't really able to answer. And that was the moment of the night. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that, well, yeah, I mean, I think you're right about the Biden reboot. We'll see what happens tomorrow. I mean, I think it's, you know, he had the most to lose tonight and lost a good bit of it.

Say, Kamala Harris and probably Kirsten Gillibrand had the most to gain. And Harris won. We can talk about Gillibrand if you want. I think, you know, in the way that I described last night, we were talking about better O'Rourke. And I said, you know, if you were only dimly aware of who better O'Rourke was, you probably came away really disappointed last night. I thought Pete Buttigieg in this debate, by that same thing,

criteria availed himself really well. If you were just aware that there's this kind of Pete Buttigieg phenomenon, then he kind of was an impressive enough candidate that you, you know, believe in the phenomenon. First of all, he was the first candidate to speak Spanish tonight. People with pools all over America won. Pete Buttigieg is speaking Spanish. I agree. I thought he just did Pete Buttigieg things all night.

He wants to be the opportunity. tunistic technocrat in this race. And he was able to play that at various times. I thought he did a good, he had a lot of moments where he sort of dove in. They were talking about free college. And he had this answer about, he said, I wanted not only to make it more affordable to go to college, but more affordable not to go to college. He had a big along, and I thought a very good answer about how can God smile at people

putting kids in cages once again bringing out that imagery. On the police shooting in South Bend, which is, of course, the issue. that's been consuming him for the last week plus. Yeah. I thought his answer was pretty good. I'm sure he rehearsed that to the letter coming in. He named the victim. He talked about,

he talked about being a mayor. He got pushed on a little bit by Eric Swalwell, who demanded he fire his police commissioner. Yeah. And then the moderators, they often did just change to something else rather than me. I'm actually answer that question. Yeah.

But, yeah, I thought he probably had exactly the debate he wanted to have. The thing about Pete Buttigieg is his momentum was tailing off a little bit even before the shooting in South Bend. And the question with him is he was on an upward trajectory. He got every magazine article he could have possibly wanted. So what's his next act?

How does he really enter? How does he really get competitive? How does he pass people like Elizabeth Warner, become competitive in the polls? And maybe it's just he waits till Iowa and does pretty well in Iowa. I think him doing well in Iowa is the way forward. And also running a pre-lean campaign that, you know, he can just stick around for as long as he wants to.

It remains to be seen, you know, how much the sort of energy that's been attached to his candidacy will really be reflected in the polls. I just wonder if we're going to look back at Buttigieg and say that whole boomlet was the product of a moment in the campaign where everybody was bored. And by everybody, I mostly mean the media. Yeah. Beto was floundering early in his campaign. That's when Warren was still trying to come back from all the DNA stuff. And there was a vacuum. Yeah.

And somebody had to fill the vacuum. And it was Mayor Pete. And now the vacuum is now Kamala Harris is a little bit more Jews. Castro's got a little bit more Jews. And everybody's like, eh, no, and mind. But here's the thing. And part of this is, you know, there was some wildcards on the stage tonight and last night for sure. But by virtue of being on the stage at all, you've been legitimized as a candidate.

And the way that he that he conduct, I mean, his present, his overall performance tonight was legitimizing. And I think that sure the boomlet may be over But I think he's every bit as legitimate and as you know Significant a candidate as anybody else that we're is any other name that we're going to be discussing a week from now I guess my question is is there more to the Buttigieg candidate than the boomlet Was the boomlet it and then it's just kind of tails off from here? I don't know I don't know I'm prepared to believe either answer But I sort of want to see where he goes from here

A candidate who had a very similar kind of night I think is Bernie Sanders Yeah. Essentially, he was being Bernie Sanders in every possible way tonight. It was almost like Bernie Sanders was giving a stump speech that was interrupted at various points by questions and pushback from angry white Colorotans. Yeah. Well, I mean, listen, Bernie's Great's victory in tonight, and we mentioned this last night, Bernie's Gray's victory was setting the terms of the debate. I mean, Bernie's like, cuckoo outsider platform

from four years ago was like the mean, I mean, like the median debate, the median point of view on the, on the debate stage tonight. It was. He has won in a lot of ways. To the point that,

so like you talked about Buttigieg with the free college, you know, kind of hedging on free college, Biden was hedging all over the place, but although mostly in a, I think it's more of a defense of his own record and the Obama legacy. to a certain extent.

And there are obviously some more moderate voices on the stage that didn't agree with, with, you know, the Bernie Sanders platform. But it's gotten to the point where even like having an opinion

that's 5% different than the 2016 Bernie Sanders platform is damnable, right? You know, I mean, it's, you're out of contention if you don't fully adhere to,

I mean, you're suspect anyway, sure. Yeah, you're certainly suspect. But I, I think you're right. I think he had a good night. I think you did what he had to do. I think that the question with Sanders is how much of the momentum from four years ago is going to carry over.

You know, how much, how much of the, no one would have to call Bernie inevitable, but how much of that sort of, that sort of continuity from the energy of, you know, the Bernie Bros. I guess that feels dismissive too, but how much of the energy of the Bernie brothers and sisters. Yes, the Bernie family carries over. and you know what kind of numbers he's looking at. Well, in next week or two. And what his viability is in not a race where he is the antidote to Hillary Clinton, but he's got a lot of voices around him, including voices that are pretty close to his position,

as you point out in a lot of issues. And he's going to be, and he's going to. It's not Bernie versus Biden. If Bernie versus Biden, I think it would be a really fascinating dynamic. That's not the race. Bernie versus Biden versus Buttigieg versus Harris versus Warren versus everybody else. And also in so much as he's an attractive candidate,

I mean, because we can all, you know, we've all spent years now, What if he had gone toe to toe to toe with Trump in the debates and everything else? I mean, he is a sort of national candidate, right? I mean, at some point you have to start pointing at which primaries he's going to win. Yeah. And I think, you know. Iowa, New Hampshire.

Those are his two, you know, if not Iowa, the New Hampshire. It's got to be New Hampshire. I mean, I don't think, I mean, yeah, I think you're right. And if he doesn't win Iowa, then what? Yeah. I mean, it gets the, it gets narrow. The Bernie Biden dynamic, which I think we had probably invested a lot of, thought in at least before this.

Didn't really emerge very much tonight. They started to talk a little bit of Iraq. Once again, the moderators moved on after Biden tried to claim that he got, after voting for the Iraq war, he helped get soldiers out of Iraq once again personalizing it by mentioning his son. Bernie traded came back and say, no, no, no.

I led the opposition to the Iraq war. Yeah, you got it. You put us there. You put us there, essentially, but that didn't really go very much past that. How about a couple of candidates that I don't have a lot of notes on? I don't, I just don't have a good sense of how they did. This is the notebook dumb candidate.

Let's go. The notebook dumb. Generic Colorado number one. Michael Bennett. Yeah. He answered the first question by asking, was that directed at me? Almost like he couldn't imagine they called on him.

Was that directed at me? That sounded like me, which I think was a quip was actually really funny if it was meant to be a joke, but who knows? It reminded me of when I was on a freshman high school basketball team, and I was like the 12th guy on the team. And the coach, I didn't play for like 19 games in a row

and then the coach pointed to me like in the middle at the end of a blowout and go Curtis get in I was like me? Really? That was sort of a response. He had a sort of effective when he was like when he was his little when he was, I'm going to say when he was angry

but he was only like 5% angry. He had a sort of effective delivery. I don't remember anything that he said. He talked about seeing when he saw the immigrants at the border he saw his mom there was a sort of a touching line but it seemed like every time he was talking. I was like, okay, this guy's, you know, got something to say. And then immediately I

forgot what he said. He was talking about, we got to take back the Senate. I wrote down Citizens United. I don't really remember what he said about it other than overturn it. He, um, his candidacy was always mysterious. I'm not sure we solved why are the question of why are you running for president tonight? Yeah, that's an important one. Yeah. And speaking of which, how about generic Colorado number two? The former governor John Hickenlober. Well, we know what John Hickenlober is running for president. I mean, he's a rich dude who assumes that he's going to win everything that he does that's that's I'm going over the top there but he's one of those he's a he is a you know fly over Mike Bloomberg right I mean he and he's and he's been touted by he's been touted by the sort of party technocrats and

spent the in the especially the ones in the media for several for years and years and now he is his he decided to run for the presidency and uh you know it seems like this is not the right cycle for him and the fact that he wasn't aware of that is about as, you know, damning as anything he's going to say. Yeah, I mean, he and Bennett suffered from this problem where they seem to think that because they're on stage, we're absolutely know who they are and we know why they're running for president. I don't know that, I don't, I know neither why they're running for president nor who they are. I really don't. And by the way, I'm not alone because when Bennett showed up to the Miami debate hall on Wednesday for the AP, a security guard asked if he was there to pick a

up his media credentials. And Hickenlooper responded, Oh, it was his Hickenlooper. Yeah, Hickenlooper responded, I'm a candidate. So he was almost denied entry, David, because I thought he was a reporter for BuzzFeed.

That's really what we take away here. According to Dave Hill, David Hill, who has contributed to the ringer.com. Not the guy who started Fox Sports. The writer, Dave Hill. Right. He's, uh, he had the Hickenlooper, and this is true,

or he insists is it true. Hickenlooper had a red, that was easy button, from Staples on his desk when he was mayor of Denver, and he would press it at the end of every meeting. We should she brought that to the debate today. Could you imagine at the end of every answer, just smacking the red,

smacking that that was easy button? He had that smile that you could see he's a guy who thinks, another job, well done. It reminded me really of a weatherman smile at the end of a forecast. I don't know why I just kept thinking of that. Another candidate I didn't really get a great handle on. Maybe you can help me as Kirstenellarbrand.

She talked a lot. She had a, she had a lot of answers tonight. She didn't disappear in the debate. I thought she was trying to kind of be opportunistic and jump in on a few things. Yeah. She jumped in on something about talking about the greed of drug and gun companies. Like she was trying to correct another candidate. I can't remember who it was.

And I didn't actually understand what her distinction was at all. She really was trying to flash policy, wonkery in detail. She talked a lot about her idea of moving us from our current. health care system toward single payer. Yeah. And she got into a lot of detail about how I have this idea and I've been working with Bernie Sanders. She said, I'm speaking directly to women when she talked about abortion rights.

Yeah. Seemingly implying that there was a lot of disagreement on stage about abortion rights. In fact, there didn't seem to be much of any at all. It's a great debate technique. I can't believe we're discussing the right of a woman to have reproductive freedom. But we're all agreeing on it. Yeah. We're all saying like we're scared because we're think the Supreme Court is going to overturn it.

Yeah. And so that would be like, I can't believe we're all discussing starting another war in the Middle East. It's like, no, but we're. Marion Williams had a lot of those moments tonight. We'll get to her in a second, too, but she had a lot of, I can't believe we're not nobody's talking about blank. We should allow, we should disallow, I can't believe nobody's talking about as a debate

tactic because, in fact, just a message to the candidates, you're on stage. So if you want to talk about something, unless the moderator is just absolutely heading you off. Just bring it up. I mean, listen, Kirsten Gillibrand is a, I mean, has a great record as a senator. She's been at the forefront of many admirable causes. I'm not quite sure what her...

I don't think as a senator, I mean, the things that she was most vocal about are things that I think most reasonable people would agree on. And I think that sort of carried over to her campaign. I'm not sure what's setting her part. I'm not sure what her answer would be to, I mean, to why she's running for president. I don't think she really established that.

And, you know, every time I want to like her. I want to figure out the answer to that myself. I'm not, I just, I haven't, I haven't done it. Yeah, she's another one who's had, had a, the slew of, why is this campaign not going the way a lot of people thought it was going to go? And another one, another one that's been slightly, and not to the same extent, but slightly annoyed by the media, you know, I mean, she's, she has been, she's been in the public eye to a degree that probably outstrips her viability for a long time.

Is that because she's from New York? She replaced Hillary. Yeah, but someone could have replaced Hillary and been a little bit anonymous. I mean, she certainly steps straight into that spotlight. Also, no, let's not forget Al Franken, too, which is a big part of her CV, and it's a big part of the reason a lot of Democrats were skeptical over Canada. Certainly the most divisive things she's, I mean, you know, that she's done on a, on a national stage by, you know, fully decrying him and insisting that he stepped down. and it's evidence that she's, you know, committed to the, you know, cause of women's rights and the Me Too movement. And I think that's really admirable. But it didn't, it didn't score her points in a lot of corners.

What did you make of Andrew Yang? Candid who was intriguing to a lot of people. If we're talking about the kind of single-digit polling was in higher single digits than a lot of, a couple of United States senators at least. Yeah. Certainly than Jellibrand, probably than either Coloradoan. What do you, what did you make a hint to? Well, he certainly got his own lane, right? I mean, it makes it a little bit easier to get to the. The universal basic income lane, a thousand dollars a month lane.

Yeah, the Joe Rogan lane, too. I mean, I know he's not the only candidate who's appeared on Rogan, but he's, but he, that's, that's sort of his lane. He's very popular in certain corners of the internet that I sometimes traffic and lurk in just to see what the, what's going on in the world. I thought he was, I thought he was fine. I thought he was sort of what I expected him to be, you know? I kind of thought he disappointed.

period for a long period. Well, he literally, I mean, he was, he got a couple of questions, but he was just completely absent from, I mean, obviously he didn't, he didn't go for any cross talk or anything like that, but that he wasn't addressed for questions for the vast majority of the debate. Yeah, he, yeah, maybe that was the moderator thing. I felt like compared to last night, maybe it was because of the star, because of the wadage of Biden, of Bernie Sanders, uh, I felt like that the moderators played favorites a little bit more tonight.

And maybe the numbers don't back that up, but it certainly seemed like, it really felt like it certainly seemed like the far the left end of the stage with williams and hickenlooper and yang and even to a certain extent ben it and swalwell on the right side were just sort of you know sidelined uh for a lot of what was going on i felt like that too and i don't know if that's because they did things like let that biden harris exchange go on for a couple of rounds which is i guess technically in violation of the rules but who in who in god's name wanted that to end yeah everybody wanted to see that uh but yeah it did feel like that and it felt like he was probably the biggest victim i felt like i heard a lot of more from Eric Swalwell. By the way, total honesty, I had not heard Eric Swalwell talk before tonight.

I did not know what Eric Swalwell looked like before tonight. I'm pretty sure. I'm happy to admit that. I believe that I have seen him as a talking cat on MSNBC a large number of times.

I cannot be sure that it was him that I remember. You could have been another congressman from the California Democratic caucus. Yeah. He had a couple of interesting moments. First of all, he kind of drew blood

early on when he talked about citing a 32-year-old Joe Biden answer about passing the torch to a new generation of politicians. I just like to say that I predicted this. I wouldn't know that people, that someone find a way to go after his age. But, uh, but yeah, it's a, that was, that was definitely a, a funny, a funny way to address Joe Biden's, uh, a funny path to ageism. Yes. He did that. The title of my memoir. Biden, Biden mostly ignored it. He had that line something, he said something to the effect of, I'm still holding on to the torch. Which is kind of funny. He kept saying past the torch.

Swarwell came equipped with many a catchphrase. The one that he came back to a couple of times was past the torch, which was another sort of like indirect, or maybe not indirect, you know, agist motto. He interrupted the first half of the debate. He kept trying to interrupt or a couple of times and he was kind of, he was insistent or persistent, but not always successful at interrupting. it was an overall like supremely awkward performance from him.

Yeah, though much better than if we're grading on the Tim Ryan curve. Oh, no. Or even the John Delaney curve. Yeah. I thought of random congressmen who are running for president. He was he was the best of those three by far. By far the most competent, by far the most fluid on the stage. I thought it was odd that he gave, when he was answering a question about gun control like two-thirds

the way through the debate. I don't know if it's because it was his only like fully prepared answer. And I don't, again, long answer that he had fully scripted. But it felt like he was giving his closing statement way, just because he wasn't sure if he's ever going to be asked a question again. She's probably not a terrible idea. No. And then his and then his little catchphrase at the end. I mean, I'm breaking up with Russia. Making up with NATO. He felt a lot like he was running for a student body president. When I'm not changing diapers, David, I'm changing Washington. And sometimes The diapers smell a lot better. The whole passing the torch motif

feels like you planned out this elaborate thing before the debate and you said, all right, number one, step one, hint at the passing the torch metaphor. Step two, win the debate. Step three, return to the passing the torch metaphor. When I'm like, no, no, we didn't quite get number two. When we're reading quotes by a candidate and I'm lapsing into Troy McClure voice for no reason,

it probably did not go well for you tonight. God bless Troy McClure, because he really predicted about 20 years of American politics. Yeah, that's true. So that was Eric Swalwell. And finally, Marianne Williamson, who qualified for the debate narrowly, she had a very interesting performance tonight. That's going to be like, that's the first sentence of the obituary, right?

Marianne Williamsman, who qualified for the debate. Who once qualified for a Democratic debate. Took her 27 minutes to get her first question. So she was pretty absent at the beginning of the night. her first answer, I just didn't understand. Her first answer felt like it contained about four or five ideas that were all sort of coming out. And it had the quality of just somebody standing up and just, you know, letting loose everything that was on their mind. Yeah.

And I just, I did not follow the, I did not follow it. Then she sort of got back into it. I thought, you know, had a pretty decent middle of the debate. She ended with her love will win bit about Trump. As I said, she was constantly calling on the rest of the can'ts. why aren't we talking about this? I haven't heard anybody talk about how we're going to beat Trump, things like that.

I'm pretty sure we did cover that at some point amidst the other issues. But yeah, she had an interesting performance. Interesting that, I mean, and, you know, let's take her seriously. Okay. For someone that, I mean, I'm saying that to myself more so than you. I was actually very impressed by the way that you introduced the Marion William Simpson part of the conversation.

For someone who's going to be saying, why aren't we talking about this important issue, why aren't we talking about this important issue, it was sort of odd that when asked what the first thing she would do when she got into office she said she would call the president of New Zealand and say

girlfriend and I quote girlfriend I don't actually have the rest of the quote here but it was you said New Zealand's the best place to live in the world and it's going to be America that's the first thing you're going to do yeah

that was maybe not that was no one else's day one agenda item no but that was hers that was definitely unique she did a lot to stand out tonight she might have won Twitter for the evening I'm not quite sure what that means.

Yeah, I sort of glanced at that. I sort of glanced at it. I couldn't tell if it was people that were just marveling at her. Yes, no, I think that was it. And I think she's another one. A lot of people having her talk are sort of vaguely aware of her. Oh, no, no, no. There's a lot of commentary on like, you know,

on her speech patterns, by the way she has hearing issue. I mean, it has like severe hearing issues that affect the way she speaks. So let's not make jokes about that. Yeah, I didn't. But this is the first time most people are heard her to talk. And I'd say most people probably saw her full stop. I think it was a tie as far as Twitter memed them goes. It was Marianne Williamson and Bernie Sanders standing awkwardly between Biden and Harris arguing

were the final two in the debate meme bracket for the night. Let's talk a little bit about MSNBC, the performance of the moderators. We did a lot of show of hands questions, a couple of show of hands questions again tonight. one was about who says their government health care plan would cover undocumented immigrants. Every hand went up at which point Trump declared on Twitter, that's the end of the race, exclamation point. They tried a lot of the number of those one word answer or give me a very short answer questions again, which sort of got shredded on night one, but Chuck Todd was really into, I just want to go down the line and figure it out. I don't understand how on night two Chuck Todd was less prepared to deal with. the realities of a of a 10-person debate. It seemed like the entire night he was just like,

Senator, please. Like there's just this very, this very quiet refrain in the background, just like, Congresswoman, could you please stop talking? Okay, I promise we'll come back. Okay, okay, okay. It was very strange. I don't know whether to make fun of him or just, or whether it's, there is no moderator who presented with 10 candidates could have done a good job at getting everybody in line. I'm not I'm not defending all the questions but isn't it isn't part of the problem at least the structure of the debate

I mean if you if I told you okay David we're going to have 10 ringer NBA analysts in a room and they're going to argue with each other and you have to moderate an hour on face on Facebook Live like what would you do? I don't know that I don't know that you can even you could carry that off

I think that I think you I don't think you have to choose between acknowledging that the debate format is difficult and dragging Chuck Todd I think he's right. No false choice in this podcast. Spoken like a true politician. Chuck Todd came Chuck Todd

was a little bit came out with a few fewer bad faith questions tonight than he did last night I believe I'll have to review the transcript Yeah, that's definitely true. He talked more than a couple of candidates last night.

That's yeah. According to the 538 calculations. Yeah, so he learned a couple lessons. But I do, but I think to, I mean, to take your question at face value, you know, there's a there's a there's a there's a there's a point of which you just have to understand your strength and if you're and if you're just going to be ineffectually saying please stop talking while no one listens to you like that what's his name from office space with the stapler then then you like then you like let like just like rachel maddow you know that you like just like elbow rachel maddow buddy cop movie i think it was it's definitely schick after tonight it had to be stick. It's stick, but what is what is the schick? It feels like they're auditioning for for like

morning television or something like that. I think it's more what are you doing here? Great to see you again. It's more like a late night election night television when the gag is always, I can't believe we're still awake at our jobs. Like if you like it reminded me a lot of election night on MSNBC. It every, it's like performatively punchy. That's sort of the gag. I'm just making a weird face at you right now because I'm just recalling the schick and I just don't understand it. It doesn't make I don't understand. They also had another audio snafu tonight. They tried to go to Lester Holt in the audience.

Miami, we're going to continue the questioning now with Lester in the audience. We are? We are in a second are going to have a question from Lester in the audience, but that was just a fake out. We're going to go to the issue of guns. That's wild. Again, I don't want to all sound like Phil Mushneck or something like that, but we should probably have the technical issues figured this is a big. big moment. It's a big moment in American life. What if, what if actually there wasn't a

snafu tonight and Rachel Madd, I was just trying to get somebody fired? That's the only other solution. A couple of cleanup items from night one of the debate. Alex Seitzwald noted on Google that, our series, excuse me, noted on Twitter that Google's search queries were overwhelmingly about the winners and losers of the Democratic debate and about NBC's technical failure. So no, do not believe any person on earth who tells you, I want a substantive debate about the issues. I don't want to know. It's just no Ritz Cracker analysis about winners and losers.

They actually do want to know about winners and losers. That was a big thing. Twitter user Mike Persak actually had the Democratic debate Royal Rumble concept on Twitter that we also floated. We did not see that. But somebody brought that up in the... Great minds.

Yeah, to the press box Twitter account. So good job, Mike. Great minds think alike. Can we talk about the ratings for night one at the debate, David? Please. Here's my analysis. The ratings for a Democratic debate will have no effect on your life. That's it. I'm done. David Leonhardt, New York Times writer also noted, I thought this was good, that when the moderators let candidates interrupt, that almost always privileges the men on stage because they're loudly interrupting. Yeah. And they're loud, oh, can I just, can I just answer that?

Can I just answer that? And so you wind up funneling more follow-ups to the guys. That was his analysis after night. I thought it was a little bit better tonight. Again, that's not based on any scientific analysis, but they, they, they thought that was a little bit better tonight. CNN, uh,

on Beto last night was pretty pessimistic. Yeah. Pretty much had your, there were, there were some people floating. Is this the end of Beto? Is it time for Beto to run for Senate? Uh,

what did you make of that? I, I mean, you can go back and listen to what I said last night. I thought, I, I, I think that he looked like somebody who would, who had,

who had, who had accepted defeat before even got on stage. We also last night predicted correctly that as soon as Castro had a good night in the first debate, that people would immediately jump to him declaring

him a good vice presidential Canada. And Jonah Balekis tweeted because at us that Castro says he got a text from Warren after the debate telling him, congratulations, you did a good job. So Warren texted him immediately after the debate. And the fact

that he said that is an incredible, it's as It's an incredible boost to war it. And just like, you know, it's like, you wouldn't believe this, but Bill actually texted me that I wrote a good piece today. And Jonah, Jonah said it was almost NBA free agent-esque. Like, you're just planting, you know, planting something in the, I still, I still think that's kind of, in that kind of insulting? I mean, isn't insulting when somebody has a good night and say, boy, you'd make a great vice president. Yeah. To me, it's even more than subtly insulted.

And yet it's a, why is that okay to, why is that, why is that, why is that, why is that, why is that, that okay to say on liberal Twitter. We're conditioned to say it. I mean, it's something we've been said. I mean, I agree with you. But I feel like it's just, it's, it's so part of the vernacular at this point that it's hard to avoid. But I, but I agree.

Donald Trump. Yes. Was finally a subject of conversation. It's finally a subject of conversation. Yeah. Yeah. I still find it puzzling how he was completely ignored or mostly ignored on night one. It was almost like night one.

I mean, certainly we had more real candidates or I don't want to, you know, you know, too general here, but we had more big name candidates tonight. But it did feel like last night was almost like the walkthrough for tonight, even though the candidates were entirely different people. But yeah, they at least addressed Trump a few times in the debate tonight. I sort of think we should have a section here at the end to talk about where we go from here. What this, because a couple things happen. One is there are substantive moments from the debate that will inform the debate, the Democratic

primary and the jockeying and all that stuff as it goes forward fundraising, et cetera, et cetera. The other thing that happens, and this is a media podcast, what we've got to say is cable news stations, newspapers will start to decide based on this stuff how they deploy resources over the next month. Got another debate coming up in about a month. David and I will probably be in front of these mics again. But, you know, if you're MSNBC, just kind of Castro kind of live in your green room now for the next four weeks.

Does Kamala Harris now get this? the glossy magazine treatment that Buttigieg got for a long time. I think yes and Elizabeth Warren got about a week ago, right? She had a couple of big magazine pieces coming out. What do you think happens now? You know, a lot of it will be based on the next round of polling, but I think based on tonight, you're going to see, yeah, I mean, a lot more, a lot more Kamala Harris.

I think Pete Buttigieg, like I said, sort of held serve and he's still going to be, he's a very available to, you know, the media and we'll be there. think the interesting thing will kind of be to see how much Joe Biden and to in a different way Bernie Sanders sort of make themselves available. Joe Biden, I mean, Bernie's pretty available. Bernie's available, sure, but I mean, he's Biden has been totally unavailable to the press. Totally unavailable. And now, I mean, and what we've seen, I mean, tonight was just evidence of, you know, like you said, there's going to be a reboot. So much of what he did didn't work. Right down to the riffing on the Obama years, it just everything that, every time he brought up his,

his time in the Obama White House, it just felt sort of sad. And I think that they were going to... And there should be a non-sad way to do that. If you're trying to ward off all these Democrats who are behind you in the polls, surely there is a happy way to wrap your arms and say, I was the vice president of Barack Obama.

So you want to come after me. That's fine. But are you really going to come after the Obama administration? And you saw even Harris tonight when she made that point about deportations, who was doing it very, very carefully. Okay. Kamala Harris for her part, by the way, referred to her, I mean, someone will have counted this, but referred to her career as a prosecutor and as heading the California Justice Department about 20 times. And I don't think ever mentioned her Senate career, which is, I think, a very canny move to sort of, you know, as we've seen a million times, senators and congressmen don't get elected, you know, or don't win the presidency. She went back to her, you know, her sort of real world experience. But yeah, you have to frame your history.

in a way that that behooves your campaign. And Joe Biden is running as a sort of legacy candidate. It's hard to escape that. But, you know, that's not always, especially in the modern,

you know, in 2019, being a lifetime politician is not always an easy place to start from. I was just looking at the, uh, the, uh,

the, uh, John Chate column that just went up, which is, uh, Kamala Harris has jumped into the top tier. So I think to me that, to me that's the, that's,

that's official. hashtag take after tonight. And then, and we'll go from there. But that feels like the big thing. I think Castro also will get another look. I think we'll see, I think we'll see lots of pieces on Castro, get lots of coverage. You know, you can imagine, you can also imagine when I read a Jay Kang tweet last night, but you can also imagine a lot of people saying, wait, interrogating the question of why were we giving Buttigieg all this attention when Castro was the mayor of a much, much bigger

city. Yeah. Also was a cabinet official, much better, much bigger and better resume. the Pete Buttigieg. Mm-hmm. And why didn't we give him attention? Because again, and it just, doesn't it just make you realize how flip of the coin, all the attention is at this stage? We're so far away.

Yeah. I mean, I don't want to depress you here, but we've got a long way to go. Sure we do. Even before people start voting it for the Democrats, much less next November, when they vote for office. And I feel media attention at this point is sort of so arbitrary. Yeah. And everybody wants it.

it's true it's true but you know it kind of comes in it kind of comes in you know in various places before before we leave i do i i've said a lot of negative things about chuck tot i want to give him a shout out for effectively quoting m&ms lose yourself at one point during the debate tonight did he do that i'm pretty sure he was like two words away from saying you only get one shot do not miss your chance to blow i'm i'm fairly certain somewhere jason gallagher's making a video right now for the ringer. That is it for tonight for us. We're back next week at our regular times,

Tuesday and Friday. I had to think about that since we've just, we've been waiting for TV and then reacting to TV. We're not going to be here tomorrow night for John Stie Sachs or C-Sax. There's like one person debate. Yeah, didn't he have like an event with like four people in the room this week in Iowa?

Oh, man. We're not going to be able to cover. We can't cover everything. We're only two people. He is David Chewaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Producer is Jim Cunningham, who's tireless.

work, tirelessly working, excuse me, to get this podcast up. Research by Chris Almeida. Back next week with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, man. That was fun. David? Well, you'd make a great vice president. Yeah.

That was easy.