Clinton v. Sanders: Can’t We All Get Along?

We don’t usually tune into the debates — at least not during this presidential election cycle — but our curiosity got the best of us last night. We’re glad we let that happen: Watching a substantive debate over important domestic AND international issues moderated by two of our favorite journalists was pretty darn neat.

But peace-loving people we are, we were a bit disappointed that the high level of substance in the debate wasn’t matched by as high a level of civility. No, there was no name-calling, thank goodness, nor was there race-baiting. But boy there sure were a lot of talking points (and talking past each other) and too much in our humble opinion dissing on the other rather than talking about what the candidate him- or herself has to offer voters.

Of course, being peace-loving people, we really don’t like it when political parties fight inside themselves. Inter-party politics is contact sport enough; intra-party bickering can be a distraction to policy progress. And although it’ll never happen even IF hell freezes over, we think it would be a pretty interesting general-election ticket to pair Hillary Clinton with Bernie Sanders.

Has political discourse devolved to the point where the leading (er, now, the only) two candidates in a major political party are fighting over who hearts (or hates) their own party’s current president more? Really? Though judging by the amount of applause, the Wisconsin audience was solidly on the side of Clinton.

And are things so bad that the two leading candidates (who generally seem to be pretty civil folks) resort to essentially saying that the other is worse than they are?

Nonetheless, we want to close by acknowledging the skillful moderating by PBS Newshour co-anchors and Managing Editors Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff. Reading this morning the newspapers’ coverage of the debate, we loved this paragraph from the Washington Post:

“With three women on the debate stage — Clinton and debate moderators Judy Woodruff and Gwen Ifill, co-anchors of the PBS NewsHour — Sanders was outnumbered, as Clinton noted with a smile: ‘We’ll take all the progress wherever we can find it.’”