Jessa Crispin: ‘Sanders was too gentle on Biden’

Throughout this primary, I’ve heard supporters of other candidates complain about Bernie Sanders’ tendency to raise his voice. Where the hell was that yelling Bernie on Sunday night? His tendency to try to keep an undignified process dignified and his discomfort with going for Joe Biden’s throat were on clear display. If Biden wins the nomination, he’s going to have to debate the least classy man ever to appear in World Wrestling Entertainment. Bernie would have been doing us – and frankly, Joe as well – a favor by channeling gay rights king Stone Cold Steve Austin and pinning Biden on issues like how the 2008 bank bailout was disastrous for homeowners, or how his warmongering has stuck us in an endless war, or how the Violence Against Women Act that he loves to brag about did basically nothing to prevent violence in relationships.

For a while, I felt like I was watching a Beckett play, with two old men on stage talking about totally different realities, talking past one another as if they did not even exist within the same space and time. Here was Bernie Sanders, acknowledging how our flawed and deteriorated health system could enable coronavirus to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans. And here was Biden, convinced he was in Independence Day, saying the coronavirus “is like we’re being attacked from abroad” – although a bunch of people getting sick because the government is too timid to ask people not to go to a goddamn St Patrick’s Day bar crawl is not exactly an alien invasion. He talked about sending the military in to deal with it, as if it were a foreign country of brown people, with oil reserves.

Once again the moderators may as well not have existed. Jake Tapper, looking weirdly waxy and like his makeup person had dumped a bottle of 1985 Cover Girl foundation on his face and smeared it around a little, couldn’t even be bothered to step in when a squabble arose about whether or not Biden had made statements about cutting social security on the floor of the Senate. He was just sitting there! Couldn’t he have pulled out his phone and gone “to the YouTube”, as Sanders implored, to factcheck that one?

The division between Sanders and Biden is clearer than ever. Sanders wants lasting change, Biden wants to respond to everything as if it were a “crisis” and keep things pretty much the same. But Sanders wasted the opportunity tonight to take his opponent out, and Biden managed to get through an entire conversation without glitching and threatening to punch someone in the face. So a win for him, then.

Jessa Crispin is the host of the Public Intellectual podcast. She is a Guardian US columnist

Art Cullen: ‘The debate was a first step to bringing the Democratic party together’

Bernie Sanders did Joe Biden and the nation a great favor by serving as an amiable sparring partner on Sunday evening, exposing the former vice-president’s weaknesses as this race is about to turn to the general election. On healthcare, the Middle East and the power of corporate influence, Sanders tried to help Biden open himself up to the progressive wing – while at the same time showing Biden the areas where he may be vulnerable to the Trump assault.

It reminded the general electorate that competence is at hand

Biden opened with a strong command of the coronavirus crisis and how to marshal the world to corral it. He was reassuring and confident in his fealty to science and facts. Voters crave it. Sanders reminded viewers that comprehensive healthcare would go a long ways to helping control epidemics. Sanders challenged Biden to go farther on climate change – a major threat in terms of infectious disease – and Biden did not resist. This debate took a first step to bringing the Democratic party together, and it reminded the general electorate that competence is at hand. Especially when Biden names a female running mate, as he pledged.

Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times in north-west Iowa, where he won the Pulitzer prize for editorial writing. He is a Guardian US columnist and author of Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope, now out in paperback

Benjamin Dixon: ‘The coronavirus crisis was the question above all others’

Coronavirus weighed heavily on the entirety of the Democratic debate this evening. Both Biden and Sanders gave their best suggestions for fighting the pandemic. The approach of each candidate shows you why their campaigns are fundamentally different, even though both candidates are running under the banner of the Democratic party.

Sanders and Biden were far apart on how to survive the disaster ahead Read more

Covid-19 is uncannily tuned to expose the fundamental problems of our system – especially the fact that millions of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck working for industries that do not provide paid sick leave. American workers cannot fathom staying home from work because of the fear that they won’t be able to pay their bills. This amid a pandemic for which we have no immunity and the only way we can halt its progress is by staying home.

There is no coronavirus question discussed by the candidates tonight that doesn’t involve a radical transformation of the American capitalist system. Unless the government immediately begins providing a universal basic income and places a moratorium on evictions, foreclosures, vehicle repossessions and utility disconnects, we will not be able to flatten the pandemic curve and save potentially millions of lives. There was only one candidate on the stage who understood this, and that was Bernie Sanders.

Benjamin Dixon is the host of The Benjamin Dixon show

Jill Filipovic: ‘Americans deserve leadership. Instead they got an embarrassing squabble’

Well, that was possibly the worst debate of the entire Democratic primary.

The United States is experiencing an unprecedented crisis. We are facing down a pandemic that could kill more than a million Americans. A great many of us are self-isolating at home, made even more anxious by the fact that our current government has totally botched the coronavirus response, putting us all at tremendous and unnecessary risk. We don’t have the most basic faith that, despite living in one of the most prosperous societies in the history of the world, our leaders will keep us safe. We have a president who has failed us at every turn, and then throws up his hands and says he does not take responsibility.

We need Democrats to present a unified, dignified and trustworthy front

In the face of all of this, we need Democrats to present a unified, dignified and trustworthy front. We need them to show leadership, which means demonstrating that they can read the room (even when there’s no audience). And right now, the room is freaking out.

Instead, we got two old guys squabbling like they were trying to break a tie in a particularly cutthroat game of bingo.

Much of the debate was spent bickering over who voted for what bill back when, instead of outlining what both men propose going forward. Joe Biden is the frontrunner and he squandered an opportunity to act like it. Bernie Sanders has a newly resonant moral authority as someone long pushing for all of the policies that would patch up the holes in the American safety net – holes that have become glaringly, terrifyingly apparent as we face down this new pandemic. Biden could have acted like the gracious and venerable leader he tells us he would be. Sanders could have held Biden’s feet to the fire on what he will do if elected, instead of rehashing the minute details of what he’s done in the past.

As this crisis has made astoundingly clear, we have a dangerously unqualified man in the White House, and he is already costing American lives. Either of these candidates would be miles better than Donald Trump. That message – if not one of unity, then at least of alignment against a mutual foe – should have been front and center.

We didn’t get that. We got two angry men getting defensive and sniping at each other. America didn’t just deserve better – at this moment, we needed better, and both men failed us.

Jill Filipovic is the author of the The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness

Lloyd Green: ‘Sanders’ luster is gone. The Democrats must rally around Biden’

On Sunday, America caught a glimpse of the coming campaign: two septuagenarians battling each other without a live audience applauding and goading. The debate changed nothing, but at the end of the evening Joe Biden was sitting on the cusp of the Democratic nomination. Come Tuesday, the former vice-president is poised for lopsided wins in Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Ohio.

Without Hillary Clinton as a foil and target, Sanders’ luster appears gone. It is no longer his time, if it ever was. As Biden put it: “We have problems we have to solve now. What’s a revolution going to do? Disrupt everything in the meantime?”

Faced with a pestilential presidency, the Democrats are ready to rally to around the Delaware Democrat. Even better for Biden, so too may be the rest of the country. Nationally, the latest polls give Biden a nine-point lead over Donald Trump. Whether Biden can sustain that edge remains to be seen.

Amid a pandemic, a battered stock market and zero-interest rates, a president disclaiming his own responsibility is more than America can afford or bear. Unalloyed self-absolution and the Oval Office are a toxic brew. A Biden presidency would not be flashy but it would definitely be engaged.