Can't win for losing
by digby
All day long, I hear Democratic leaders, strategists and pundits alike hectoring candidates to stick to "kitchen table issues" and talk about things the voters really care about. They are told to present a positive vision of what they want to do because nobody out in the real world ever asks about Trump or impeachment or any of that.
So, last night the candidates mostly took that tack.
And this is what they get. From Jonathan Allen at NBC:
President Donald Trump was the big winner of the first 2020 Democratic debate.
The Republican commander in chief, who was on his way to an economic summit in Osaka, Japan, emerged from the scrap largely unscathed — barely mentioned at all — even though he is a uniquely antagonizing and energizing force for Democratic voters.
At the same time, the 10 candidates who were in the room here at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts often competed against one another to appeal to narrow subsets of the primary season electorate. Their jockeying, punctuated by efforts to outflank each other to the political left and conduct a middebate Spanish-speaking contest, could alienate swing voters important to the party's chances against Trump in November 2020.
For long stretches, it seemed, they completely forgot about the man who has been at the center of pretty much every discussion among Democrats for the last two-plus years — the man they're competing to take on next year. The obvious reason: The motivation to beat each other was, on this night, more urgent than defeating Trump — a life-or-death moment for some of their campaigns.
Trump was the chief beneficiary of that dynamic.
You just can't win with these guys...
I personally think they should have hit Trump harder. I think most Democratic voters want to see it. But apparently, the consensus among Democratic leaders is that this is just another election against an anodyne Republican white guy --- it could just as easily be Jeb Bush. So this isn't really a battle to save the constitution and the system from a malevolent rogue political party and the demagogic conman who's leading it but rather a competition waged solely about differences on policy.
Personally, I think Warren has been coming up in the polls is because she's doing both. She is unsparing in her criticism of Trump and was the first candidate to come out for impeachment and she has bold plans.
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