10 questions for the second Democratic debate

(Image credit: Illustrated | SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images, Avector/iStock)

published 30 July 2019

On Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, 20 Democratic candidates will meet in Detroit for the second pair of 2020 presidential primary debates. (Five more will presumably be watching the proceedings at home like the rest of us.) Here are 10 questions worth considering as we wait for the first of the two meetings:

1. Will Joe Biden get his act together?

Even before he and the other candidates had left the stage in Miami last month, there were reports that members of Biden's staff were losing their minds. Not only did he make a complete mess of the controversy over his past support for busing — he sounded lost and confused and, frankly, just old throughout the evening. According to Politico, sources close to the campaign are saying that Biden is "uncoachable." If this is true, I don't expect the situation to change any time soon.

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Which brings us to our next point. In the first debate, only Kamala Harris and one of the obscure white male congressman (I'm not going to pretend that I remember which one) really bothered to go after Biden. If there was any question of whether attacking the former vice president directly would be effective, it is safe to say now that the definitive answer is "yes." But that doesn't mean other candidates will be willing to go after the messy political record, much less the character, of someone who still remains one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Party.

One person I don't expect to be taking many swipes at Biden is Andrew Yang, the maverick wonk offering what is probably one of the most varied and interesting platforms in the modern history of campaigning. This is because I do not expect him to speak much at all. During the Miami debate, Yang says that on the handful of occasions when he wanted to interject he found that his microphone had been turned off. If true, this was shoddy and malicious. It would also be fitting for something that was clearly meant to be a television spectacle rather than an actually incisive debate about issues.

Lots of earnest types will want to poo-poo Jason Johnson of The Root for saying so, but I'm not sure he was wrong when he said the other day that Elizabeth Warren runs the risk of coming off as a "bore" to voters. Now it could very well be that voters need to be bored for a while so that they can stop caring about tweets and start thinking about how to reform our financial system. Warren can play the rhetorical bluster game as well as anyone, but she is most impressive when speaking off the cuff about a difficult question of public policy. Will she dumb it down on Tuesday night? My guess is no.

With the possible exception of Marianne Williamson, whose campaign is attracting attention for very different reasons, the only real breakout star to emerge from the last round of debates was the California senator. Once lingering in the single-digit no man's land with Beto and the other indistinguishable white guys, she is now polling as high as second place. If she bombs on Wednesday and falls in the polls again, she will not be the first primary candidate to squander a solid debate performance. But I don't see this happening, at least not yet.

In 2016, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton disagreed about so many things that they might as well have been running for the nomination of two different parties. This time around so many of Bernie's signature policies have become mainstream — including his support for single-payer health care — that, if polling is any indication, his old progressive coalition is breaking up. If Warren is Bernie except less loud and more specific, why do we need Bernie? This is a question he is going to have to answer sooner or later.

Between his mean-spirited criticism of four freshman House Democrats, his nasty comments about the city of Baltimore, and probably 50 other things I have forgotten to mention here, President Trump has given the Democratic candidates ample material for attacking him on stage this week. Should they bother, though? If there is anything we learned from the 2016 election, it is that Democrats need to run for something and not simply against Trump. I doubt there is a single living American waiting to make up his mind about whether the president is a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe, or an idiot until Tulsi Gabbard gives us her opinion.

Few political rises and falls have been as precipitous as that of Francis O'Rourke, who is almost certainly going to drop out soon after failing to win his second election in as many years. If it seems like only months ago he was being profiled by a different glossy magazine every week and gushed over as the future savior of the Democratic party, well, that's because it was. I for one simply cannot believe that he is meeting the exact same fate as the last Texas liberal Wunderkind who was destined to turn the Lone Star State blue until somehow she didn't. Now that the aura is fading, what does he have to say that could distinguish him from the other moderate white liberals all seeking the same job? I'm not sure even he knows.

Speaking of which: after the last debate, a guy named Eric Swalwell called it quits. This was probably deeply saddening to the roughly six living Americans — not counting his mom — who knew that he and John Delaney and Tim Ryan were not the same person. Here's hoping that the field will get smaller again after Wednesday. I can't be the only one who wishes we had a more reasonably sized slate of, say, 20 candidates.

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.

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