This is no time for presidential debates and wild promises from the candidates. It’s also no time for presidential tweets and wild promises from the incumbent.
The split screen of Sunday’s debate was not between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders; it was between the cold hard reality of a global pandemic and the cold dead arguments about negative TV ads.
There is only one issue in front of American voters, and it is the reason they are emptying supermarket shelves and wondering how they will pay their bills this month and next.
That issue is not about past votes in the Senate, who supported the war in Iraq, or how to unite the Democratic party. It’s about how to survive the health and financial disaster that lies ahead.
On that issue, Biden and Sanders were even further apart than their socially distanced podiums on CNN’s debate set.
Biden’s reaction to the pandemic was a glimpse into what Obama’s staffers called the shit sandwich they were handed by their predecessors: notably the financial collapse and great recession of 2009. Not to mention the swine flu pandemic and the Ebola crisis.
Sanders’ reaction was a critique of the system, a big picture view of the structural reforms needed for long-term change: from campaign finance reform to a nationalized healthcare system.
Biden spoke like a man who had worked in the Situation Room to marshal the forces of the federal government. Sanders spoke like a man who wanted to build a new federal government.
“This is like a war, and in a war you do whatever is needed to be done to take care of your people,” said the former vice-president. That meant widespread testing, deploying the military to set up hundreds of temporary hospital beds, and rapid economic support for the whole country.
For his part, Sanders sounded less interested in waging war on the coronavirus, and more determined to wage war on the political system.
“It’s clear this crisis is only making a bad situation worse,” said the Vermont senator. “In a good year, without the epidemic, we’re losing up to 60,000 people who die every year because they don’t get to a doctor on time.”
This was a strangely obtuse debate between two disputatious old men. Quite apart from the urgent need to talk about the pandemic, their own argument has already been resolved by the voters who gave Joe Biden a wide delegate lead over the last few weeks.
“As much as we can, we hope this will be a conversation between the two of you,” said CNN’s moderator, Jake Tapper, as he kicked off the debate.
If they were genuine, CNN’s hopes were dashed within minutes.
Biden knew that Sanders would turn the coronavirus conversation towards his favorite topic of a socialized healthcare system known as Medicare for All. So Biden pointed out early and often that Italy’s socialized system had not stopped the pandemic.
“With all due respect to Medicare for All, you have a single-payer system in Italy,” Biden said. “It doesn’t work there. It has nothing to do with Medicare for All. That would not solve the problem at all.”
But the debate about healthcare was really an argument about something much bigger: was this the time to turn the government around or to blow it up?
“People are looking for results, not a revolution,” Biden said about the response to the pandemic. “They want to deal with the results they need right now.”
The candidate formerly considered an insurgent did a fine job of pinning Biden down on his past readiness to include social security in budget debates, and on his lack of details about how he would address the climate crisis.
But scoring points doesn’t count for much when the economy is in freefall and America’s cities are shutting down to slow the pandemic’s spread. And it counts for even less when Biden has all but won the nomination already.
Sanders tried to make the case that Biden was propped up by big money and the party establishment. “You need to take on Wall Street. You need to take on the drug companies and the insurance companies and the fossil fuel industry,” he said. “You don’t take campaign contributions from them. You take them on and create an economy that works for all.”
Biden’s response amounted to turning his pockets inside out. “Bernie’s implication is somehow I am being funded by millionaires,” he said. “In the last Super Tuesday and before that, Bernie outspent me two, three, four, five, six-to-one. I didn’t have any money, and I still won.”
To be clear: both the surviving Democratic candidates sounded more pandemically plausible than a president who was still tweeting yesterday about Hillary Clinton’s emails, his former national security adviser (who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI), and the Senate Democratic leader’s comments about the US supreme court.
It’s almost as if Donald Trump spends his days trying to distract the nation from the fact that he is fundamentally useless at his job.
In the meantime, both the septuagenarian candidates face a more pressing challenge: keeping clear of the virus that appears to be most life-threatening to people of their own age group.
“I’m very careful about the people I’m interacting with,” Sanders said, ignoring the question about his recent heart attack. “I’m using a lot of soap and hand sanitizers to make sure that I do not get the infection.”
“Well fortunately I don’t have any of the underlying conditions you talked about and have to worry about,” observed Biden, swiping at his slightly older rival, while also saying he was washing his hands all day.
It was that kind of night: a desperately personal debate about all the small stuff we used to care about, and a desperately small debate about all the personal stuff we currently obsess about.