'What's Been Missing Is Courage': Elizabeth Warren Throws Down the Gauntlet

By Richard Wolffe, Guardian UK

27 June 19

Warren towered over the first Democratic debate and its biggest questions on the economy and healthcare

here was one dominant figure on the very crowded stage in Miami at the first TV debate of the 2020 presidential election.

She happened to be the smallest and oldest figure in the middle of the pack, but it made no difference. Elizabeth Warren towered over the opening sequence of the first Democratic debate and its biggest questions on the economy and healthcare.

There’s a reason why Warren has risen steadily in the early polls to the point where she is threatening the previously safe space occupied by Bernie Sanders as the insurgent challenger to the establishment frontrunner.

Yes, she has a plan for everything. But more than policy proposals, she has the rare ability – especially for a senator – to talk about the big complex stuff in simple and direct ways.

Midway through the debate, she was lobbed a meatball of a question about gun violence. She talked with great empathy about kids asking her the toughest questions at her town halls: how would she keep them safe as president? She threw in a statistic about children dying not just in mass shootings but on the streets, and quickly rattled off a series of policy ideas. But most of all, she spoke with a sense of purpose and urgency: “Gun violence is a national health emergency in this country and we need to treat it like that.”

The debate moderators did their very best to goad the other candidates to attack Warren, citing their previous criticisms and qualms about her ideas about breaking up big tech companies or abolishing private health insurance. But her rivals backed away from the fight, while the Massachusetts senator argued repeatedly that the country needed to do big things. “What’s been missing is courage,” she declared early on.

The contrast with most of the men on stage was sharp. Beto O’Rourke, the supposed rock star congressman standing next to her, went missing for so long it was hard to remember the name of his first hit song. Every time he tried to get into one of his grooves, someone knocked him off his rhythm. There was plenty of emphasis in each of his answers but precious little point.

The man who walked all over his riffs was his Texas rival, Julian Castro – previously a fringe figure with no obvious path to getting noticed. But Castro’s signature policy area – immigration – is the most sprawling and under-reported scandal of the Trump administration, which became an enormous asset to him during the debate.

Castro was no doubt helped by a news cycle dominated by a shocking photo of a Salvadoran father and daughter drowned on the banks of the Rio Grande. Still, the former housing secretary and mayor of San Antonio was as compelling and comprehensive on immigration as Warren was on the economy.

“It’s heartbreaking,” he said. “It should also piss us all off.” Castro challenged the other candidates to change the law that currently criminalizes the undocumented migrants who cross the border. It was a challenge that Beto, strangely, couldn’t seem to address head on.

Wednesday’s debate was often an exercise in shadow boxing. The real targets of the candidates’ punches were absent on the night but loomed large nonetheless: Donald Trump and Joe Biden, two old white men who better get used to this kind of treatment.

Trump might be used to starting fights from the safe distance of his Twitter account, but he isn’t used to watching a cable TV loop where he is everyone’s punching bag. You can rest assured that he will absorb all the best Democratic attacks with the sound judgment and self-restraint he displays whenever he’s considering the superior popularity and record of Barack Obama.

As for Biden, he is about to experience something highly unusual on this, his third campaign for the top job. As the frontrunner, he is a unifying target for the scrappy, desperate mob chasing him.

As the debates grind on through the summer and fall, the jabs at Biden will grow more pointed and coordinated – until he reaches the same stage Hillary Clinton did in late 2007, when she equivocated so badly that she suffered a dismal night on the debate stage.

In case you can’t remember, the candidate who pounced on Clinton’s indecision was one Chris Dodd, the otherwise decent and entirely forgettable Connecticut senator. At this point of the cycle, Obama was himself a dismal debater who only warmed up to the process in the latest stages of the primary cycle.

Wednesday’s debate was as strangely compressed as the cartoon White House that NBC News chose to use as a backdrop to the stage.

There were ten candidates who struggled to get as much time to make noise as a bag of popcorn in a microwave. There were five moderators who represented the warring fiefdoms inside the peacock kingdom of NBC. Thanks to a sound malfunction, several of them managed to talk over their rivals even when they weren’t on stage.

Some of the candidates never broke out of their own clichés. Cory Booker was repeatedly the only candidate who lives in an inner-city neighborhood that is raked by gun violence. Tulsi Gabbard most definitely served in the military and wants to stop America going to war. Bill de Blasio apparently did lots of great things in New York.

Several of the male candidates looked alternately surprised or confusingly belligerent about being on stage.

But it was Amy Klobuchar’s experience that carried the biggest warnings for Joe Biden – and anyone else in the centrist bloc of the Democratic party.

Her pitch of Midwestern reasonableness and purple state compromise was ripped as a complacent and compliant acceptance of the status quo. Her promise that she could beat Trump by reaching his voters seemed premature. Her citing of Obama’s compromises sounded like reaching back to a long-lost time when Democrats still believed there was someone reasonable on the other side of the aisle.

Those days are gone, after two and a half years of Donald Trump and the Republican party he has reshaped with lies, delusions and plain old derangement.

Whether Biden understands that reality – as Warren clearly does – may be the biggest question of this first phase of a very long primary season.