Midway through Tuesday night’s lengthy Democratic presidential debate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren engaged in a telling exchange with moderate former Congressman John Delaney.
Democrats win, Warren said, not when they “choose a candidate we don’t believe in, just because we’re too afraid to do anything else,” but rather “when we figure out what is right, and we get out there and fight for it.”
Not so, Delaney countered.
“Democrats win when we run on real solutions, not impossible promises — when we run on things that are workable, not fairytale economics.” There’s an important difference, he said, between “a big idea” and “an idea that’s dead on arrival.”
It set Warren up for a line that lit up liberal Twitter: “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.”
The back-and-forth was part of a strong overall performance by Warren, making the case alongside Bernie Sanders for nominating an unapologetically liberal candidate touting bold, transformative policies.
She had to fight hard to make that case, because just about everybody else on stage was arguing that such a candidate would be potentially disastrous for the party.
Bold plans for skittish voters
Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, who seemed to fare best of the various moderates on stage, set the tone in the very first minute by knocking the “wish-list economics” of the leading liberals in the race.
Delaney warned that Sanders and Warren would lead to the same general election defeat as McGovern, Mondale, and Dukakis. Amy Klobuchar, warning of the need to win moderate midwestern states, said “I have bold ideas, but they are grounded in reality.” John Hickenlooper said that Sanders and Warren were calling for “massive government expansions.”
On policy after policy, the other candidates tut-tutted at pulling the party too far left. Bullock said that Warren’s positions on immigration “are playing into Donald Trump’s hands.” Pete Buttigieg called for easing college affordability without the radical step of large-scale debt forgiveness. Hickenlooper fretted that Warren’s trade policies are too protectionist. Beto O’Rourke and Marianne Williamson, among others, argued against full-scale Medicare for All. Delaney and Hickenlooper criticized the expanse of the Green New Deal proposal Warren supports. Tim Ryan criticized pretty much everything as too liberal.
At one point, Klobuchar lamented that Democrats seem to be “more interested in winning an argument than winning an election.”
Many progressives are probably snickering at those criticisms. But polling suggests — and campaign staffers close to the ground frequently attest — that the Democratic Party electorate is filled with skittish voters, terrified of losing the election to Trump.
Some of them, and perhaps even enough of them, are open to Warren’s argument that a bold liberal agenda is the path to electability. She’s making the case about as well as it can be made; it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that she had that anti-moderation zinger ready to unleash on Delaney.
Waiting for tomorrow
But let’s be honest: Delaney isn’t where those nervous Democrats are going to take shelter.
In fact, few, if any, of those critics on the stage Tuesday night have much of a clear path to benefitting from painting Warren and her ideas as too risky for 2020.
Unfortunately for her, there are a whole slate of such potential benefactors taking the stage 24 hours later.
If a good chunk of the Democratic primary electorate came away from Tuesday night’s affair with a renewed wariness of going full liberal, they will have a bunch of options Wednesday selling themselves as viable, compelling alternatives.
Lead among them, of course, is Joe Biden, the established safe choice. He went unmentioned in Tuesday’s debate, though several candidates seemed to be auditioning to be the younger, less problematic version of the former vice president — and Warren’s calls for boldness seemed aimed as much at him as those she was ostensibly addressing beside her.
For those wanting something with a little more zing than Biden, but somewhere short of the radical risk of Warren, Wednesday will offer Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Julian Castro, Jay Inslee, Michael Bennet and Kirsten Gillibrand.
If Warren did her job well enough, all of them will seem like pale paste next to what she’s offering. This might be a tough time, however, to sell her kind of sizzle.
