{"id":2448736,"date":"2019-09-15T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-09-15T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=312858"},"modified":"2019-09-15T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-09-15T06:00:00","slug":"mike-littwin-history-says-change-is-coming-in-dem-race-but-latest-debate-was-a-lot-of-the-same","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/mike-littwin-history-says-change-is-coming-in-dem-race-but-latest-debate-was-a-lot-of-the-same\/","title":{"rendered":"Mike Littwin: History says change is coming in Dem race, but latest debate was a lot of the same"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The real news from the Houston debate was not Joe Biden\u2019s overpraised performance. He was OK for the first hour, not so much after that and that\u2019s not even counting the late-breaking record player reference. Or the continued benefit to Elizabeth Warren for making Bernie Sanders\u2019 points better, and more reassuringly, than Bernie can. Or Julian Castro\u2019s cheap shot at Biden\u2019s memory\/age. Or the Yang Gang Lottery, now officially open. What more is there to say on Andrew Yang except how did this guy make the debate stage while a U.S. senator watches on TV?<\/p>\n

And the real news certainly wasn\u2019t the networks\u2019 insistence that each debate begin with an extended take on health care reform even as all the candidates \u2014 OK, with the exception of Kamala Harris, of course \u2014 continue to say exactly what they had said in previous debates. By the way, when you\u2019re thinking about this topic and Medicare for All, you might want to read a report cited by The Colorado Sun that the Denver metro area\u2019s 27 for-profit hospitals made more than $2 billion in pre-tax profits in 2018.<\/p>\n

No, the real news came from the third tier. And the reaction to that news may say much about the future of the Democratic primary.<\/p>\n

History tells us that frontrunners often fade and that someone usually emerges from the back of the pack. The frontrunner argument is obvious. Jeb Bush, Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton, Ed Muskie, on and on. And Gary Hart, the 1984 phenom who went to New Hampshire to endorse Michael Bennet, makes the come-from-nowhere argument come alive. Jimmy Carter could have done the same. In 2004, John Kerry went from leader to the middle of the pack to winning. John McCain took a similar path in 2008.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s probably a mistake to believe the field is already narrowed to three. If you watched the debate Thursday night, it looked like three third-tier candidates won some attention.<\/p>\n

Cory Booker had another strong debate performance, funny and passionate. And yet, he was just as good in the second debate and that didn\u2019t matter at all. In a post-debate interview on CNN, he joined Castro in taking a swing at Biden, citing the former vice president\u2019s tendency to meander, while questioning whether Biden can \u201ccarry the ball all the way across the end line without fumbling.\u201d It was a hard shot \u2014 Booker said it wasn\u2019t ageism, that Biden has always been this way \u2014 but it wasn\u2019t a Castro-level cheap shot.<\/p>\n

Amy Klobuchar had her best debate performance, meaning that for the first time anyone noticed she was on the stage. But her platform seems to be that since she\u2019s from the middle of the country \u2014 Minnesota \u2014 she, uh, can appeal to people in the middle of the country.<\/p>\n

But, mostly, it was Beto O\u2019Rourke\u2019s best day in the race since his first one. Nearly everyone on the stage praised his response to the gun massacre in El Paso, Texas, his home town. The most remembered quote of the night will almost certainly be on Beto\u2019s mandatory buyback plan of guns designed for use on the battlefield. When asked if that means he\u2019ll confiscate weapons, he said \u2014 and get ready for the bumper stickers and T-shirts \u2014 \u201cHell yes, we\u2019re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.\u201d<\/p>\n

The questions now are whether Booker, Beto or Klobuchar get any kind of bounce in the polls and whether the race at the top \u2014 among Biden, Warren and Sanders \u2014 changes at all and whether Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, both sitting in the middle, moved the needle after relatively quiet nights.<\/p>\n

If Michael Bennet was watching the debate, he has to hope for some kind of breakthrough from the bottom tier. Bennet has been praised by any number of pundits for his campaign, but he has yet to figure out a way to make any headway in the polls. It\u2019s one thing to complain about the DNC trying to limit the field, as Bennet does constantly, and another to complain when you can\u2019t make 2% in the polls.<\/p>\n

My theory on why there has been so little post-Biden movement in the race, other than Warren\u2019s rise and Harris\u2019 rise and fade, is two-fold.<\/p>\n

One, that between them, Sanders and Warren have a lock on the issues that move progressives and activists while the rest of the field is basically offering more pragmatic (read: less exciting) answers to the same questions.<\/p>\n

Two, Biden also is going for the pragmatic vote, but that\u2019s not why he\u2019s leading the polls. Rather, it\u2019s his success on two fronts \u2014 creating the perception, which may be reality, that he is the best choice to win back white working-class voters and, at the same time, building a huge polling lead in the African-American community, which is why he ties himself to Barack Obama in nearly every sentence.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy enough to predict that eventually someone wins the Warren-Bernie fight, but will Biden hold up? It\u2019s strange, but he seems to struggle most when answering questions about race. Late in the debate, he answered a question on what can be done to repair the legacy of slavery by suggesting that parents who live in segregated neighborhoods \u201cdon\u2019t quite know what to do\u201d and that one thing that parents in these neighborhoods can do \u201cis make sure you have the record player on at night, make sure that kids hear words.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course many parents in segregated neighborhoods are perfectly capable and don\u2019t need parenting advice. Biden was saying that kids from disadvantaged families are often behind when they get to school because many haven\u2019t been exposed to the level of vocabulary that kids with more advantages have been. Some modern studies question the concept of a word gap. \u201cRecord player\u201d \u2014 at least he didn\u2019t say 8-track \u2014 was a blip, but the rambling quote, in its entirety, will make your head hurt. It sounded a lot like paternalism to me, but that seems to have been lost in the record player discussion.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m still ready to believe, because the history is pretty clear, that by the time we get to Iowa, there will be unanticipated dramatic change in the race and that the Big Three of today are unlikely to finish 1-2-3 in the February caucuses. But I\u2019m also ready to believe that this debate didn\u2019t bring us any closer to figuring out what the dramatic change might be.<\/p>\n

Mike Littwin runs Sundays in The Aspen Times. A former columnist for the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post, he currently writes for ColoradoIndependent.com.<\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The real news from the Houston debate was not Joe Biden\u2019s overpraised performance. He was OK for the first hour, not so much after that and that\u2019s not even counting the late-breaking record player reference. Or the continued benefit to Elizabeth Warren for making Bernie Sanders\u2019 points better, and more reassuringly, than Bernie can. Or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2448736","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-26 18:46:31","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2448736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2448736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2448736\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2448736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2448736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2448736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}