On Tuesday night, lower-tier candidates tried repeatedly to paint Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as too far-left for the general election.
The script was flipped Wednesday evening, as candidates one after another tried to paint Joe Biden as too far to the right for the primary election.
Sanders and Warren weathered their storm by embracing, and arguing proudly for, their liberal label. They have chosen to rise or sink on their progressive branding.
Biden, while giving a generally strong debate performance, made no such full-throated defense of his centrism.
Instead, Biden handled the criticism with a grab-bag of feints, parries, and ripostes. In some cases, he counter-attacked to question the liberal credentials of the accuser. Sometimes he defended his plan in question as more liberal than credited; other times he seemed to caution against going to the left. He used Obama as a sweeping, cures-all-faults, free liberal-cred pass, but also as a shield against laying any faults of the administration at his own feet.
Individually, most of these maneuvers worked pretty well at keeping him from harm.
But in the aggregate, they make for a muddled argument for his candidacy. Do moderates have their man, or is he really a liberal? Does he represent a return to Obama policies or not?
Moderator Jake Tapper tried, nearly two hours into the debate, to get Biden to address the broad question of what type of candidate the Democratic Party should put forward — the issue that led, the night before, to Warren’s strongest argument for a bold, liberal candidate . Tapper even quoted Warren from that Tuesday debate, warning against “small ideas and spinelessness.
Tapper then asked Biden: “What do you say to progressives who worry that your proposals are not ambitious enough to energize the progressive wing of your party, which you will need to beat Donald Trump?”
Biden responded that he would win because, during the Obama administration, he had helped Michigan recover from the recession. The answer steered so wide of engaging with the core party dispute raised by Tapper, it seemed possible that Biden somehow had completely misunderstood the question.
Fending off blows
Kamala Harris and others criticized Biden’s health care plan as too little, too slowly. Biden eagerly counter-attacked, but essentially stood his ground against the left. “Obamacare is working,” he said, warning against abandoning that legacy, and against the costs he believes would come with more radical plans.
But, when Jay Inslee and others hounded Biden for an insufficiently aggressive approach to climate change, Biden fought hard to defend himself to liberals. Rather than nod again to centrists, by cautioning against overly expensive and business-harming overreach, Biden tried to insist that his plan is no middle ground, but equally ambitious to the task.
Then on immigration, when Julian Castro came at him from the left, Biden seemed willing to stand back on centrist ground. Castro wants to de-criminalize unauthorized border crossings; Biden, in line with centrist Democrats, rejects that notion.
But then, when Bill de Blasio demanded twice, point-blank, for Biden to say whether he approved or dissented from Obama’s policy on deportations — a blot on Obama’s record for many on the left — Biden claimed to be unwilling on principle to disclose such internal discussions with the former president. It was a patently ridiculous excuse for not answering; a short time later, in the above-mentioned answer to Tapper, Biden openly boasted that he was among the advocates in the White House who talked Obama into bailing out General Motors.
Cory Booker — who called out Biden for citing Obama when convenient and distancing himself when useful — led the charge Wednesday night in criticizing Biden from the left on criminal justice. Well prepared for the attack, Biden struck back at Booker for his own record as mayor of Newark. As to where he really stands on the issues, well, Biden stood by his tough-on-crime past by citing its popularity at the time, while defending his current views as fully committed to reform. He has yet to admit that he was wrong in either case; he simply defends his two opposing views simultaneously.
Similarly, when predictably criticized by Harris for his past support of the so-called Hyde Amendment against government funding for reproductive services, Biden insisted that he was right to have been for it, and also right to be against it now. As with criminal justice reform, he offers an unconvincing case that conditions changed, rather than his own mind.
And in perhaps the most Biden-esque moment of the debate, he claimed under criticism from Kirsten Gillibrand that “I never believed that,” in reference to a 1981 op-ed column written by … himself.
It’s possible that all of this will allow Biden to remain palatable to Democratic primary voters across a wide spectrum. Clearly, though, he had originally hoped to breeze through the nomination process without directly engaging with his Democratic opponents, in large part to avoid all of these potential acts of self-definition entirely.
Circumstances, and poll numbers, have forced him to abandon that strategy. He is being forced to put together his new political brand on the fly—unlike Sanders or Warren, who have forged theirs in steel, for good or ill.
The Obama box
It was toward the end of the fiery criminal justice discussion that Biden acknowledged that he was being attacked repeatedly as insufficiently liberal.
He could have used that observation to embrace moderation as a virtue. Or, he could have defended himself as a true liberal.
Biden could even have made a nuanced case for issue-specific solutions transcending tired ideological distinctions.
None of the above for Biden. He simply stated, as he has before, that “Barack Obama knew exactly who I was” when choosing him for the ticket in 2008.
That, apparently, is meant to close the book on any criticism. Good enough for Obama then, Biden says, should be good enough for any Democrat today.
It’s not an implausible path to the nomination, being simply the closest stand-in for the popular former president.
In fact, that association probably means that those attacking him — who are seen to some extent as attacking Obama in absentia — hurt themselves with Democratic voters more than they hurt Biden.
Which is why the winners Wednesday night were probably the candidates who debated Tuesday night — including Sanders and Warren — who were able to stay far clear of the whole back-and-forth slugfest.
