What A Day - Dems Debate In The Palmetto State

Episode Date: February 26, 2020

Last night seven democratic presidential candidates took the stage in Charleston, South Carolina for the tenth debate of this election cycle and the last one before Super Tuesday. Overall, this one was a mess. We’ll talk you through the big moments, and the ways the candidates tried to define themselves against frontrunner Bernie Sanders. And in headlines: Bob Iger retires, Trump’s least favorite Supreme Court justices, and the CDC weighs in on coronavirus.

It's Wednesday, February 26th. I'm Akilah Hughes. And I'm Gideon Resnick. And this is What A Day, where we're giving up getting heated over a presidential debate for Lent. I actually was planning on giving up presidential debates for Lent, but I guess I could just not be mad. Baby steps, you know? We're all growing as people. On today's show, Democrats are at it again, debating. Last night, seven Democratic presidential candidates took the stage in Charleston, South Carolina for the 10th debate of this election cycle.

10th. Yeah, yeah. It's been less than a week since the last one, too. So only two more debates left. Thank goodness. Well, this is the last debate before the primary in South Carolina on Saturday, which is the final early voting state. And it's also where Joe Biden is really hoping to stage his comeback. So we had Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar,

Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Tom Steyer. They discussed a range of topics from education to affordable housing to Cuba to Russian interference in the 2020 election. They discussed it all. So before we go any further, let's talk about the vibe last night. It's pretty disorderly, yeah? Yeah, to say the least. It felt chaotic at times and strange energy from a number of the candidates and also the room itself. Lots of crosstalk in a way that I think the prior debate I thought was good because people were seemingly articulating their points better and they weren't overlapping. But this one was just a lot of kind of incoherence at times. And given the possibility that the race could win over the next couple of

weeks, and now we're getting to a stage where almost 40% of the delegates are awarded next week in Super Tuesday, there was also a sense of desperation at times from some of the candidates. Yeah, for sure. I think that a lot of the candidates saw Elizabeth Warren sort of overperforming last week and thought, that's what I'm going to do. And they probably could have just split the difference on that energy change. It was a lot of agro energy. You know, you can fight back, but you don't have to like break an actual bottle. But one thing I did appreciate, it's Black History Month. And, you know, speaking of black people, 60 percent of the Democratic base in South Carolina is black. And so, you know, Steyer brought up reparations, maybe a little pandering. However, a lot of hands shot up. A lot of people wanted to rebut his idea that they didn't support it. They were the moderator was pretty desperate to change the subject, but I just felt like it was a good

change to hear about something that wasn't the four topics we kind of just go over and over and over again. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, at the end of the day, we've been talking a lot about who the candidate is that's going to win that significant portion of the electorate, you know, both in South Carolina and nationally, And it's got to be one of the people that's left in the race. All right. Well, this was an opportunity for the remaining candidates to draw a strong contrast with Senator Sanders. We all know he is the front runner so far and he's up by a large margin when you look at the polls for a lot of the upcoming states. Last night, you saw the moderators pressing him on how he plans to pay for his plans and if he can beat Trump and whether he'd condemn authoritarian regimes around the world.

And the other candidates also went after Sanders on the practicality of his agenda, his electability. So, you know, let's just listen to some of that. Our plan, we have we have laid out options all over the place. One of the options is a seven and a half percent payroll tax on employers, which will save them substantial sums of money. Bernie, let me respond to this. Does the math add up? No, the math does not add up. In fact, just on 60 Minutes this weekend, he said he wasn't going to rattle through the nickels and the dimes. Well, let me tell you how many nickels and dimes we're talking about. Nearly 60 trillion dollars.

But I want to come back to this question about the filibuster because this is not some long ago bad vote that Bernie Sanders took. This is a current bad position that Bernie Sanders holds. And we're in South Carolina. How are we going to deliver a revolution if you won't even support a rule change? We just cannot afford some of the stuff people talk about. But if you let me finish, if you keep on going, we will elect Bernie. Bernie will lose to Donald Trump and Donald Trump and the House and the Senate and some of the state houses will all go red.

And then between gerrymandering and pointing judges for the next 20 or 30 years, we're going to live with this catastrophe. I will allow Senator Sanders a quick response. Whoa. Well, so they started with Medicare for all, you know, and they asked Bernie to do the math in front of the class on how he'll pay for it. Gideon, we both know health care is a major voting issue. You know, America is an outlier from the rest of the world's rich countries and making it a human right. So how did that go down? Yeah, I mean, we've been around and around on this for 10 times now.

It's in every debate. Yeah, you know, the various health care proposals that the candidates have. But this specific time, given Sanders' position, many of the other candidates were specifically tearing his proposal down about everything from how much it costs to how they believe it will have this negative ripple effect down ballot and important House and Senate races. That I think is derived from the idea that, you know, Republicans could fear monger about it and make it make voters concerned that people would lose their current coverage. In terms of the cost, though, Sanders pointed to a new study from Yale that found Medicare for all saving money and lives. He released a fact sheet earlier this week that explained the taxes would go up for businesses and most Americans, but premiums and

other health care costs would go away. Now, it's not clear whether the tax increases he has proposed would fully fund the program that he is proposing. We'll have to see how this all actually shakes out with voters in the rest of the primary. But once it gets to a general election, Donald Trump has not presented a health care plan. All he has presented is an effort to take health care away. That's right. You know, just remember that this whole time. Donald Trump, no plan. Four years. I mean, really, five years if you think about the primaries before. No plan, man. No plan. All right. Well, as we heard in the tape there, Sanders got challenged on his unique position on the Senate filibuster. He doesn't favor eliminating it, but that's a whole additional podcast episode.

The bonus, if you will. Yeah. And also later in the night, he was taking a task about his voting record regarding guns. So can you talk about how that went? Yeah, that particular moment was definitely one that stood out. Sanders acknowledged that he had cast bad votes, specifically in this case in 2005 for a law that granted immunity to gun manufacturers in wrongful death lawsuits. That was kind of the back and forth between him and Biden. But he also spoke about how his stances on guns have changed over the years. He referenced a race that he lost for the House in 1988, when he was supporting an assault weapons ban and kind of credited that for the reason that he lost. And more recently,

he said that he has a D minus rating with the NRA when actually, in fact, in 2018, he got an F. But broadly speaking, this is one of the rare topics for Sanders that he has evolved on. I think a lot of the time his campaign talks about consistency. And this is one of the ones that he has changed. And he acknowledges that change. But obviously, in a Democratic primary, when gun violence is a major issue for voters, it's a difficult thing for him to get through. And it's unclear if or know, if or how this

would be brought back up in the future. And for the most part, the rest of what Sanders was facing was more intense, but topic wise stuff that he had, you know, fielded before. For sure. So that was Sanders versus the other candidates. Moving on, there was at least one new topic that came up in this debate, the coronavirus or COVID-19. It gave the candidates a rare opportunity to criticize the Trump administration and its response to the outbreak so far. But I want to take this out of politics right now and talk to the American people because this is so serious. I'm not going to give my website right now. I'm going to give the CDC's website, which is CDC.gov. What we did with Ebola, I was part of making sure that pandemic did not get to the United States,

saved millions of lives. And what we did, we set up, I helped set up that office in the presidency, in the president's office on diseases that are pandemic diseases. We increased the budget of the CDC. We increased the NIH budget. We should have our president today and he's wiped a lot out. We have to work and expand the World Health Organization. Obviously, we have to make sure the CDC, the NIH, our infectious departments are fully funded. This is a global problem. We've got to work with countries all over the world to solve it. So Biden and Sanders are also pointing there to the president's proposed budget for 2021,

which includes a budget drop for the National Institutes of Health. So right, and all of these answer some commonality ongoing after the president as a news story unfolds. This comes on the heels, too, of officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying Tuesday that the public should prepare for the, quote, inevitable spread of the virus throughout the United States. Don't love that. Well, speaking of Biden, the South Carolina primary is coming up. He has staked his candidacy on the state where the majority of the Democratic electorate

will be black voters, who Biden has polled well with since entering the race. But he struggled in the first two states and was a distant second in Nevada. And his support in polls among voters of color has fallen in both South Carolina and nationally. Do we think that he met the moment? I mean, he certainly hopes he did. And it's a little difficult to gauge sometimes with Biden, because I think there's an acknowledgement from even his supporters and him himself that sometimes these particular moments in debates aren't always his strongest suit. He might do better in front of audiences where it's more kind of controlled

in a campaign setting. But one thing that he did say during all of this was that he's not just counting on the votes to show up just because of who he is and that he was confident about his odds in South Carolina. My entire career has been wrapped up in dealing with civil rights and civil liberties. I don't expect anything. I plan to earn the vote. I hear I'm here to ask. I'm here to earn it. But folks, I intend to win South Carolina and I will win the African-American vote here in South Carolina. Mr. Biden, will you continue if you do not win South Carolina? You have said that South Carolina will determine the outcome of this presidential race. If you don't win South Carolina, will you continue? I will win South Carolina.

Yeah. So Biden, as he does in these debates, leaned on his experience on a number of topics, international relations with China, Syria, gun legislation and more. But there was also a moment that was illustrative of the squeeze that he might now be feeling as South Carolina approaches. We've talked previously about how Tom Steyer is making inroads in polling in South Carolina. As surprising as that is, it certainly was to me, with some pollsters showing him climbing to third place. Now, perhaps sensing that or knowing it from his own public or private polling, there was a moment when Biden went after Steyer for previously investing in private prisons that, quote, hogtied young men. Steyer responded by saying that he had sold his stock in private prisons and brought up

the crime bill, which led Biden to deem Steyer one of the funnier phrases of the night, quote, Tommy, come lately. You know, I love a Southern debate. They use all this foghorn, leghorn, antebellum language. And I think it's just it's more colorful. I appreciate it, even if it's Tommy, come lately. Yes, exactly. I don't know if that one's going to stick, but we'll find out. And overall, Biden also got testy sometimes saying at one point to the moderators, quote, I know how you cut me off all the time, but I'm not going to be quiet anymore. OK, and that and all of this is sort of indicative of a sense of urgency that Biden and his campaign are feeling to try to wrestle this race from Sanders in South Carolina and then Super Tuesday almost immediately after that. Yeah. And on that front, where do you think

that this leaves us besides, you know, with the slight headache and just a desire to watch animal TikToks for the next few days? Yeah, I hope I can take part. I mean, until we see polling otherwise, I think it leaves us where we started. That's something I think we've said after other debates, because it's hard to get a, you know, immediate snapshot of what's going on. But broadly, for all the candidates, right, like Biden is needing to get some kind of momentum out of South Carolina. I think Steyer is looking for a strong finish there as well, would be a reason for why he is in the race. Buttigieg is hoping that he can get some measure of support from voters of color that has not materialized yet. And then looking beyond South Carolina to Super Tuesday, Warren and Klobuchar want to win their home states. That would obviously

be big. And if there are losses there, that wouldn't look good. Sanders, as we talked about, got knocked around in this debate, but he still can pull in money. He has this organizing machine, and their campaign wants to take control of this race next Tuesday. And then for all of them, the prize that they have for getting to next Tuesday is Bloomberg waiting with all of his money and being on the ballot for the first time. And compared to that, some of these other candidates are running out of money and running out of these opportunities to put wins on the board to keep their campaigns alive. Yeah, that's right. Well, we will have more for you later this week on how the race is

shaping up in South Carolina and beyond. Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. that excludes Muslims from a clearer path to citizenship. Right-wing Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been pushing a Hindu nationalist agenda since the election and passed the citizenship law late last year. Demonstrations have been predominantly peaceful, but protesters began to face an uptick in violence around the time of President Trump's first official visit to India this week. This violence signals the rising hostility of Modi's nationalist supporters towards protesters of the law and the Muslim community.

As you may have heard from the dim debate, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Americans to brace for what they now say is an inevitable outbreak of the coronavirus within the country. Officials claim immediate risks in the U.S. are low, but people should start preparing for disruptions to daily life. Things like working from home or school closures to limit face-to-face contact. Although in my experience, you usually don't get face-to-face contact in school until the 10th grade homecoming dance when the chaperones are off discussing the movie Avatar. Too real. Senators heard from health officials in a closed-door briefing,

after which some GOP senators even expressed frustration with the Trump administration's lack of preparedness for an outbreak. If the virus continues to spread, it could lead to the cancellation of the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Olympic officials will make their determination by May. Yikes. So as we said, President Trump was in India yesterday, but the poor guy got homesick and he needed to make everybody angry here in the United States. He did this at a press conference by suggesting that from now on, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg should recuse themselves from Supreme Court cases

that have, quote, anything to do with Trump. That's just how things work, folks. Trump is mad at Sotomayor because of what she wrote in her dissent in a recent case that will allow the United States to deny green cards to poor immigrants, or, more accurately, how her dissent was mischaracterized by Fox News. Trump's anger at Ginsburg dates back to 2016, when he was running for president, and she said he was a, quote, faker. Either way, it's insane for Trump to suggest that justices should stay home because he doesn't like them, but it's not that surprising.

He's been raging like a toddler against law enforcement and justice systems since a not-guilty impeachment verdict turned what was left of his heart to coal disney ceo bob eiger a man who wakes up every day at 4 15 a.m to ride a versa climber for 45 minutes and could probably jump over me from standing has been replaced with bob chapik disney's head of parks and resorts under eiger's leadership the famous mouse with the red shorts grew even bigger buying up pixar Marvel, Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox for just under $87 billion total. Iger also helped launch Disney Plus last year, which became the go-to destination to watch the first 15 minutes of Disney Channel original movies about dogs who can snowboard. He's regarded as one of the most successful CEOs in the modern entertainment industry. And as recently as last year, Oprah was asking him to run for president.

For now, he'll stay on at Disney as an executive chairman. Then we'll see you in 2024, Mr. Agar. President Bob. And those are the headlines. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, compliment us on our fashionable outfits, and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading and not just gorgeous chalkboard menus

and coffee shops like me, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick. And we'll see you bright and early. What a day is a product of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis. Sonia Tunn is our assistant producer.

Our head writer is John Milstein, and our senior producer is Katie Long. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.