Thursday, June 27, 2019

My General Reaction to the First Democratic Debate Last Night

I didn't hear all of the first Democratic presidential debate last night, which featured half of the field of twenty candidates achieving at least 1% in polling.  But I did listen to the first hour and as such got a pretty good idea about these ten people and their strategies with their respective campaigns.  Most of them seemed to feel that it was necessary to practically shout out their answers to the posed questions in order to establish their credentials as being passionate...Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Jay Inslee, Bill de Blasio, and Tim Ryan stood out in this regard. Beto O'Rourke and Tulsi Gabbard seemed clueless and unprepared...no surprise to me there.  And I appreciated the thoughtful answers from Amy Klobuchar and John Delaney, although the latter had an annoying tendency to go way beyond his allotted time and even ignored the moderator's call for him to stop.  A lot of people seemed to think Julian Castro did well...compared to O'Rourke I suppose he did. Most of the contestants seemed to be in a competition to assert their own far left ideological supremacy over the others...once again it was Klobuchar and Delaney who stood out in contrast to them with their own more reasoned, nuanced answers.   Personally, I think the debate helped Elizabeth Warren probably more than anyone else and put Beto O'Rourke in big trouble from which I doubt he will recover.  From what I did hear, I thought the panel of questioners did a pretty good job of sticking to the issues and away from personalities. Should be interesting to hear the rest of the field debate tonight...

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