Morning After Takeaways From The Democratic Debate

• There are many, many things I care about more than campaign finance reform. It’s hard to imagine many people find that a more compelling topic than student debt, foreign policy, or race relations — so why does Bernie Sanders constantly bring it up?
• Hillary Clinton was poised, polished, and a little bit profound. She was collected even though Sanders was extremely disrespectful at various points throughout the night — the finger-wagging he does when she’s speaking drives me crazy, not even to mention how he shakes his head condescendingly and makes the most absurd-looking facial expressions to try and communicate his furor over what she’s saying. Acting like a child doesn’t look good on a 74-year-old man.
• Sanders repeated the tenants of his campaign message over and over again. We get it, the economy is rigged, nothing’s fair, single-payer health system. The message is strong and clearly resonating with millions of Americans. When Clinton tried to get him to explain his plans and pointed out that implementation and execution are as important as broad ideas themselves, he repeated his broad ideas again. If he wants to succeed, he has got to make everyday Americans understand his plan, if he has one. Or maybe that’s what he’s afraid of: the process of switching health systems altogether would likely be far too much for many Americans to stomach if they knew exactly what would be involved.
• Once again, on foreign policy, Sanders clung to the fact that Clinton voted for the war in Iraq in 2002. Hillary, once again, responded that a vote in 2002 doesn’t constitute her whole foreign policy and that she’s grown as a person. It doesn’t seem to me that either of them are getting much out of this exchange repeated ad nauseum. Sanders uses it to mask the fact that he either has somehow not learned anything about foreign policy after 40 years in politics or, somewhat more troubling, in my opinion, that it’s not a priority to him. He is right in that sound judgement is, of course, one of the principal qualities one would hope for in a president; she is right in that experience is another. But the debate over a 2002 vote (albeit an obviously important one) and judgement vs. experience just isn’t moving forward the discussion over who should be the Democratic nominee. Move on.
• Clinton “won” the debate, but so far pragmatism hasn’t appealed to Bernie’s voters, so I’m not sure it’ll make a difference.