If you can right now, please consider supporting our work with a donation so we're ready for the hard work ahead. It's a pivotal moment for our democracy, accountability, and so much more-but you already know that, you just read a Mother Jones article. You're busy, so we'll keep this short: We need to raise $325,000 over the next month to help fund the hard-hitting, fiercely independent reporting you get from us. But Clinton more than the others seemed to grasp the importance of reminding the audience that the obstacles a Democratic president will face will be a small price to pay for not handing all three branches of government over to the right.By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from Mother Jones and our partners.
The candidates spent depressingly little time explaining how they’ll grapple with that kind of obstruction, apart from striving for consensus. Very few of the issues discussed on stage, including points of consensus among Democrats like paid family leave, are going to come easily. But on another level it gives the whole game away. On a rote political level, it isn’t a surprise that on the one issue where Sanders’s left flank is vulnerable, he alighted from lofty ideals into the realm of the possible.
A consensus has said we need to strengthen and expand instant background checks, do away with this gun show loophole, that we have to address the issue of mental health, that we have to deal with the strawman purchasing issue, and that when we develop that consensus, we can finally, finally do something to address this issue. I believe that there is a consensus in this country. I spent a lot of time with him in the situation room going over some very difficult issues.”īut the biggest contrast on offer wasn’t among Democrats, but between Democrats and Republicans, and here the debate underlined the basic tension at the heart of the Democratic campaign.Ĭlinton staked out the sweet spot between aspirational and pragmatic politics, when she dubbed herself “a progressive, but.a progressive who likes to get things done.” Yet it was Sanders, the most radical candidate, who expressed the most pragmatic-and arguably too pragmatic-sentiment of the evening. Defending his past heresies on gun control, Sanders said:Īll the shouting in the world is not going to do what I would hope all of us want, and that is keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have those guns and end this horrible violence that we are seeing. “After the election, he asked me to be secretary of state. "I recall very well being on a debate stage about 25 times with then-Senator Obama debating this issue,” Clinton said. Sanders was the only candidate who came close to matching Clinton’s ease and enthusiasm, but he lacked the kind of rhetorical quickness that at one point allowed Clinton to gain cover for her own support for the Iraq war from Barack Obama’s opposition to it. But he frequently offered up the kind of canned, and over-mannered answers we were primed to expect from Clinton. He delivered persuasive moral arguments for progressive policy, and provided a strong reminder that just a few weeks ago, eleven Republicans were angling to be the most reactionary and insensitive candidate on their own debate stage. Two Democratic candidates-Jim Webb and Lincoln Chaffee-were frankly painful to watch, like single-A ball players whiffing against a big league power pitcher.įormer Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley played an interesting and substantive role.
HILLARY DEBATE TELEPROMPT SERIES
If the Democratic Party, and the Clinton campaign, had reflected in a clear-eyed way on her last campaign, they would have started the debate series over the summer, and scheduled at least a dozen of them.Ĭlinton outshone her rivals on Tuesday night in Las Vegas in several different ways. The same contrast is evident in this campaign, with the important caveat that this time, she isn’t running against a half dozen polished debaters. During the 2008 campaign, Hillary Clinton’s facility in the primary debates stood in immense contrast to her stiffness behind teleprompters and press conference lecterns.
0 kommentar(er)
