14 Million People Watched The Debate Thursday-- Enough To Lower Biden's Irrational Standing In The Polls?

Right after the Thursday night ABC News debate ended, CNN.com published a column by their in-house pundit Chris Cillizza asserting that Biden was a winner and Elizabeth Warren a loser. Many decades ago I was managing local San Francisco bands. One of them was The Readymades and I had booked them an opening slot for a big touring band-- maybe Roxy Music?-- at a bigger venue than they usually played. I was disappointed when the top critics in town for the big newspaper didn't show up. However, towards the end of the headliner's show he made his entrance and came right over to me and asked me how the show had gone. I told him how great my band was-- a somewhat biased report-- and how the two bands were a perfect match. That review appeared in the newspaper the next day. I can't imagine that Cillizza actually watched the debate and came away with the idea that Biden did better than Warren; I wonder if it was Biden's campaign manager told him that was the case.

The following morning Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent did a more thought-provoking piece on the debate, Think Castro Was 'Mean' To Biden? Get Ready For An Absolute Bloodbath. "Biden's Democratic rivals," he wrote, "have now begun to raise questions about his age and mental competence. But they are doing so ever so gingerly, and even apologetically. President Trump is not being nearly as cautious or circumspect. In that contrast resides something that deserves more attention about the Biden age issue. The question isn’t merely whether Biden has the stamina for a grueling campaign, or whether Biden will be able to handle debates with Trump. It’s also whether Biden or indeed other Democrats are prepared for the massive onslaught of absolutely brutal and distortive attacks that Trump and his propaganda apparatus will wage on this particular front-- attacks that you can be certain will include all sorts of shamelessly propagandistic media manipulation and outright disinformation tactics."

James Hohmann also covered the Castro attack on Biden: "Castro follows in the footsteps of Eric Swalwell, who ripped into Biden and told him to 'pass the torch' during the first debate only to get nowhere. The California congressman dropped out days later. Castro certainly won’t. This isn’t fatal. But the exchange illustrated Biden’s underappreciated strengths. While he’s widely perceived as having a tenuous lead in the early polls, Biden’s support has thus far proven remarkably durable. At the same time, however, Castro broached an issue that is of genuine concern among many Democratic leaders and may have foreshadowed what’s to come as the field winnows and lower-performing candidates become desperate to break through.”

As the Boston Herald reported this week, "Biden has lost his lead in New Hampshire with U.S. Sen Bernie Sanders jumping ahead in what is now clearly a three-person race for the Democratic primary, a new Franklin Pierce University-Boston Herald poll shows. Sanders tops the poll at 29% of likely Democratic primary voters. Biden comes in second with 21% of the vote and Massachusetts U.S. Sen Elizabeth Warren is third in the poll with 17%.

And it isn't just New Hampshire Where Biden Is No Longer "Frontrunner"

And that was before Biden flopped Thursday night. Politico's John Harris: "Biden’s previous uneven performances didn’t dislodge him atop the race, and so caution is justified in predicting bleeding wounds from this one. Even so, discursive answers on substantive issues like deportation of undocumented immigrants and Afghanistan, an oddly dated reference to a 'record player,' disrespectful digs and patronizing swipes from rivals, all raise the question: Can he withstand four more months of this before actual Democratic voting begins?”

Eric Levitz asked the question all Democratic primary voters need to ask themselves: Would You Leave Joe Biden Alone With Trump? Levitz's 3 main takeaways from the debate that Cillizza thought Biden won: "The Democratic front-runner cannot speak in complete sentences when he is feeling tired or defensive. And 90 minutes of debate is enough to make him tired. And a reference to something that he said about race in the 1970s is enough to make him defensive." They left him feeling "rather apprehensive about the prospect of the Democrats sending Joe Biden into battle against Donald Trump next year. A three-hour debate can be tiring. But a 14-month campaign would seem considerably more so. If Biden can’t keep his talking points straight for an entire evening, what shape will he be in after running the gauntlet between today and his televised showdowns with the president next fall? And if a pointed question from an ABC News anchor can reduce him to spasms of anxious blather, how well will he hold up when Trump comes after his family? ...To my eyes, the following exchange between Biden and ABC News’ Linsey Davis on the question of our collective responsibility for slavery reads like dialogue from an obscure Beckett play-- but to an objective observer, perhaps this reads as a thoughtful, cogent answer from a man manifestly equipped to be the next president of the United States:"

Linsey Davis: Mr. Vice-President, I want to talk to you about inequality in schools and race. In a conversation about how to deal with segregation in schools back in 1975, you told a reporter “I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather. I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation, and I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.” You said that some 40 years ago, but as you stand here tonight, what responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?

Joe Biden: Well, they have to deal with the … Look, there is institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining, banks, making sure that we are in a position where-- Look, we talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title 1 schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the equal of … A raise of getting out of the $60,000 level.


Number two, make sure that we bring in to the help with the stud-- the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we need … We have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are required-- I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them.

Make sure that every single child does, in fact, have three, four, and five-year-olds go to school. School! Not daycare, school. We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not want they don’t want to help. They don’t know want-- They don’t know what quite what to do. Play the radio. Make sure the television-- excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night. The phone-- make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school-- er, a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.

Davis: Thank you, Mr. Vice-President.

Biden: No, I’m going to go like the rest of them do, twice over, okay? Because here’s the deal. The deal is that we’ve got this a little backwards. And by the way, in Venezuela, we should be allowing people to come here from Venezuela. I know Maduro. I’ve confronted Maduro. Number two, you talk about the need to do something in Latin America. I’m the guy that came up with $740 million to see to it those three countries, in fact, change their system so people don’t have to chance to leave. You’re all acting like we just discovered this yesterday! Thank you very much.

This is what President Obama had in mind when he warned Biden to think long and hard before running and embarrassing himself and his family. Levitz wrote that nominating Biden is "a needlessly risky bet to make, given the party’s myriad other options. Polling continues to indicate that, contrary to conventional pundit wisdom, Bernie Sanders is a formidable general-election candidate. Elizabeth Warren’s favorability has steadily increased throughout the duration of her campaign, as has her standing against Trump in the polls. But if you are more moderate in your ideological sympathies, or nervous about nominating someone 'too progressive,' there are plenty of sharper centrists you can back. Cory Booker is a gifted orator. Amy Klobuchar is good at winning elections in the Midwest. Beto O’Rourke is tall. Before Thursday, none of Biden’s ideologically sympathetic competitors had dared to explicitly sell themselves as a more mentally 'with it' alternative to Uncle Joe. But after Julián Castro (clumsily) went there during the debate, Booker embraced the 'many people are saying Joe Biden’s lost a few steps' line of attack."

My one fear is that a Trump-Biden general election will hinge about which one is more senile and which one lies more. What could possibly discourage voters from bothering to turn out? Nielsen reported that the debate had 14 million viewers on ABC and Univision, beating everything else on TV. Millions more watched on their computers. I suspect that "Sleepy Joe" could never hold up against Trump. Tom McCarthy, reporting for The Guardian wrote that "while Castro’s attack on Biden might not have landed, the frontrunner repeatedly seemed to fumble the facts: he at one point mistakenly referred to Sanders as the president, he badly botched the name of the Moms Demand Action gun safety group and he said nonviolent offenders shouldn’t be in prison when he (apparently, aides later said) meant nonviolent drug offenders. When he got in trouble, Biden got punchier, and sometimes wilder, with an answer on education confusingly swerving into the previous topic, Venezuela and foreign policy.

Jacobin's Branko Marcetic wrote that we all know how these debates go: "moderators will drape a right-wing framing around their questions, almost everyone will attack Medicare for All, and Joe Biden will misrepresent his record." He conceded that Thursday night Biden's performance was "surprisingly nondisastrous... By clearing the extremely low bar of appearing coherent and not having any of his body parts malfunction on stage, Biden has already been awarded top marks for his performance, even declared the winner. But it’s important to remember that Biden’s performance rested on a patina of lies. Challenged by moderator Jorge Ramos on the distinctly Trumpian nature of the 'Obama-Biden' administration’s immigration policies, Biden dubbed the comparison 'outrageous.' 'We didn’t lock people up in cages,' he said. 'We didn’t separate families.' Both are untrue."

As fact-checkers quickly pointed out, Obama and Biden infamously did detain immigrants, including children, in cages. And while it’s true the administration didn’t make snatching children from migrants an official policy as Trump has, breaking families apart, sometimes permanently, was a cornerstone of the Obama-Biden approach to immigration, usually by arresting and simply disappearing the undocumented parents of US citizen children, but also, under the Alien Transfer and Exit Program, by separating families traveling together at the border, including minors. Pressed by Ramos for dodging the question, which asked if Biden and Obama had made a mistake by deporting as many people as they did, Biden was forced to re-endorse the policy, saying that Obama “did the best thing that was able to be done at the time.”

When the issues of mass incarceration and segregation came up, always fraught territory for Biden, the former vice president engaged in more rewriting of history. “I’ve been involved from the beginning,” he said about the fight for black civil rights, later repeating that “from the time I got involved, I started dealing with” institutional segregation.

This, too, is false. Biden was reviled by educators and the civil rights community for the Biden-Eagleton amendment, passed in 1977, which forbade what was then the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) to spend money on school busing. In 1980, the Education Commission of the States voted to declare the amendment the most “far-reaching” legislative roadblock to civil rights enforcement. On the 25th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1979, the Civil Rights Commission published a report that bitterly noted the lack of progress on desegregation and specifically criticized the law. The commission’s chairman charged it had “aided and abetted” anti-integrationist forces, called for its repeal, and labeled it “one of, if not the major civil rights issues confronting the country at this time.” Political scientist Stephen C. Halpern called it a “death knell” for the use of the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s Title VI in education, and it ground desegregation efforts to a halt around the country, including in Chicago. Ironically, it had no effect on the court-ordered busing initiative in Biden’s hometown of Wilmington, the ostensible reason he had crafted the amendment.

In the process, Biden staked out a position on desegregation that was far from liberal. He nonsensically claimed there was a “conceptual difference between desegregation and integration,” charged integration with being “racist and insulting” in some of its forms, and even said that integrating people “so that they all have the same access and they learn to grow up with one another and all the rest” was a “rejection of the whole movement of black pride.” As he explained to the attendees of a fundraising dinner in 1975, the liberal idea that the United States owed its strength to its status as a “great melting pot” was “a bunch of poppycock because we know being black and white and Christian and Jew breaks us apart.” By the time Biden, who entered the Senate with a reputation as a civil rights advocate, ran for president in 1986, his hometown paper noted his major legislative accomplishment was arguably a tough-on-crime law he had authored with former segregationist Strom Thurmond.

With a history like this, it’s hardly surprising Biden would gloss over it.