“How tired are you at this moment?” “It was a long night. It was a long night.” “The CNN-New York Times Democratic Presidential Debate will feature the largest field of presidential candidates ever on one stage.” “So if you could describe the debate in an emoji, what would the emoji be?” “It probably would be Elizabeth Warren’s, like, eyes — an emoji that just has your eyes getting wider and wider and wider as you realize, oh, they’re coming after me.” “I want to give a reality check here to Elizabeth.” “A yes-or-no question that didn’t get a yes-or-no answer.” “I was surprised to hear that you did not agree with me.” “Tonight’s debate showed Elizabeth Warren is now clearly one of 2 front-runners.” “I have made clear what my principles are here.” “And you saw that with so many Democrats deciding to take her on.” “Can you walk us through this very interesting exchange Biden and Warren had there?” “And I went on the floor and got you votes. I got votes for that bill.” “When this exchange happened, I wrote to a colleague and said, that’s the moment of the night. When he said —” “I’m going to say something that is probably going to offend some people here. But I’m the only one on this stage that has gotten anything really big done.” “She went and went to one of her signature achievements, which was helping create the Consumer Financial Protection Board. And then Biden, sort of strangely, I think, felt the need to keep it going, like he really wanted to get into this with Warren. Yeah, Joe Biden just had a hard time being relevant in this debate. And so he got very hot, as if either, you know, he had to help this lady out or she owed him something.” “Senator Warren, do you want to respond?” “You could sort of see she took a little bit of time to decide how she was just going to lower the boom on him.” “I am deeply grateful to President Obama.” “And then she did it by basically giving a shout out to President Obama and no mention at all of Joe Biden. And then Joe Biden just could not let it go. He felt the need to make that line.” “But understand —” “You did a hell of a job in your job.” “Thank you.” “Boy, like Twitter just went [gestures], you know, a lot of people just found it a very patronizing, condescending remark about a female leader.” “Look, this is why people here in the Midwest are so frustrated with Washington in general.” “Mayor Pete decided to come and go against his biggest rival in the Iowa caucuses. He decided to come in and turn to her in a way he’s never done before and take her on directly, look at her in the face, and really lay out a case for how she was avoiding the question about whether she’d raise middle-class taxes to pay for ‘Medicare for all.’ Interesting, Elizabeth Warren did not look at him. She has a real habit, when her opponents are going after her, of not looking at them in the eye. She doesn’t turn and address them when she’s giving her pushback. She’s always trying to make her case to the voters. Any kind of attack on a rival is usually rehearsed. So I’m sure that Pete Buttigieg figured out ahead of time what his 75-second hit was going to be on Elizabeth Warren.” “Your signature, Senator, is to have a plan for everything, except this. No plan has been laid out to explain how a multi-trillion dollar hole in this ‘Medicare for all’ plan that Senator Warren is putting forward is supposed to get filled in.” “And that was it. He delivered it. And you know, Warren, she didn’t quite do this. But you know, she sort of said, look —” “We can pay for this. I’ve laid out the basic principles. Costs are going to go up for the wealthy.” “And sometimes I think that Senator Warren is more focused on being punitive or pitting some part of the country against the other.” “No question Beto O’Rourke had one of most memorable lines of the night when he called Elizabeth Warren ‘punitive.’ He was sort of going there and applying an adjective to her persona and her message. Remember, it’s four months before the Iowa caucuses. And the candidates who are going to fall, it’s not often going to be from a knockout punch. It’s going to be death by a thousand cuts. And if any of these candidates are going to beat Elizabeth Warren, it’s going to be by using lines like ‘punitive’ that, you know, start reinforcing some discomfort that you might have with her. So that’s just, like, one cut of a line that Beto was really trying to hammer home.” “Costs will go up for the wealthy. They will go up for big corporations. And for middle-class families, they will go down —” “Elizabeth Warren wants to use these debates basically to just keep hammering home her message to voters. She doesn’t want to get into fights with her rivals.” “But the way —” “Join me in saying that his Twitter account should be shut down.” “No. Let’s figure out —” “No?” “… why it is that we have had laws on the books —” “She can’t just be bringing her case to voters because a lot of voters are pretty suspicious of that case, suspicious that she has left-wing ideas. And she needs to be engaging directly with her rivals in order to show that she can beat them.” “Is the field getting whittled down at all?” “Not really.” “Do you wish it would?” “No. No, I love these debates. I think they’re super interesting. I used to write about theater. I was, like, the Broadway reporter at The Times for years. And I love this stuff. The stagecraft is fascinating — the people who learn their lines and can deliver them incredibly well. And then people who learn their lines, and they look like bad actors.”