Elizabeth Warren Inspired a Debate That Fucking Sucked

If I wanted to listen to white Boomers yell about accomplishments, I could have volunteered to answer phones in the Oberlin admissions office on the day that rejection letters went out to legacy applicants. Instead, I watched Tuesday’s South Carolina Democratic primary debate. 

Make no mistake, Tuesday’s debate—and pardon my use of a jargony political term here— fucking sucked. Everybody who isn’t currently or hoping to one day be paid by CBS agrees. It was to the Democratic party what Season 2 was to True Detective, what a soul patch is to an otherwise marginally attractive male face, what a speakerphone is to a funeral. 

Even the ads fucking sucked. “Fact! We all love video doorbells!” said one of the creepy twins from that channel about home improvement I never watch because I’m a millennial who won’t own a home until the next housing crisis depresses the market enough that I can afford it. No, we don’t love video doorbells. 

That the debate was bad isn’t up for, uh, debate. But pinpointing why it was as bad as it was could help stave off future bad debates. Or at the very least provide catharsis for the fools who just gave another two hours of their finite lives to Tom Steyer’s plaid tie. 

My theory is that it all started with Elizabeth Warren. That’s not to say that she caused other people to act in the way that they did, just that she may have inspired it. In the pre-Nevada caucus debate last week, she came prepared with fact-laced takedowns of every other person onstage, and they were mostly caught off guard. She pantsed Michael Bloomberg. She inspired admiring gasps in living rooms across America. Most importantly to other politicians, Warren’s performance at the final debate before the Nevada caucuses last week was electrifying enough to enough people that it helped her raise $14 million in a matter of days. She didn’t win in Nevada, but going into the South Carolina primary and Super Tuesday, her position in some national polling rose to second place.  

Political messaging is a little like Hollywood in that once something works once, everybody else produces slightly inferior copies until the copies are so bad that they make their inspiration, the original good idea, seem less good. It seems like Warren’s righteous debate anger spawned a half dozen other plans to be righteously angry at a debate, and a stage that small can’t handle that much interrupting.  Everybody was aggrieved, everybody was incensed, everybody wanted to speak to the manager. Everybody who showed up to the debate on Tuesday showed up ready to fight. 

And all that would have been fine if the moderators had in any way done their jobs. Not only did they allow irrelevant slapfights to continue for way too long, they asked stupid questions and allowed stupid answers to continue on for much longer than they should have, all while somehow interrupting candidates as they were arriving at interesting points. It was a free-for-all shoutfest devoid of value and meaning. 

First, moderators kicked off the debate with scaremongering about Bernie Sanders’ identification as a “democratic socialist,” with a question that could have been written by a Concerned Fox News Mom who isn’t so much concerned with “socialism” as she is with finding a bite-sized excuse to vote for an incumbent who throws toddlers in cages but keeps her taxes low. Later in the debate, moderators questioned Sanders about complimenting social progress achieved under the authoritarian regime in Cuba. “Can Americans trust that a democratic socialist will not give authoritarians a free pass?” 

Are all democratic socialists destined to be power-mad dictators? Are all clowns destined to be John Wayne Gacy? Can Americans trust that Ronald McDonald won’t bury dozens of his murder victims in a Norwood Park, Illinois crawlspace? There are plenty of reasons for a debate moderator to express concerns centrists might have about Bernie Sanders’ far-left economic philosophy. Bad-faith scaremongering isn’t one of them. 

Speaking of clowns: Mike Bloomberg. What’s he doing up there? He set the tone by accusing Bernie Sanders of being the favored candidate of Russians, and then refusing to call China’s president Xi a dictator, as though a post-Trump America will fashion policy out of spite. 

Warren again shivved her favorite target Bloomberg to suspiciously loud boos from a suspiciously raucous pro-Bloomberg crowd. But this time, because everybody else was doing a two-bit rendition of the Warren Shuffle, her performance didn’t shine as much as glimmer. 

Amy Klobuchar and Joe Biden had an exchange about who invented wanting to protect domestic violence survivors from gun violence. It was weird. 

Tom Steyer, like a golden retriever getting riled up when the kids are running around and acting too wild, sort of barked occasionally when the other people were also yelling.  

The only candidate that wasn’t perpetually losing their shit was Mayor Pete Buttigieg, but that’s because his game plan was to smirk. When moderators asked him what the public’s biggest misconception was about him, Pete answered that he was too chill. “Some would say unflappable,” he added, doing his best Barack Obama. Who would say “unflappable,” Pete? The same guy who edits your Wikipedia page? 

Democratic primary voters deserved more than what the debate gave them. They deserved to hear about the candidates’ plans to address immigration concerns, but moderators cut candidates off each of the three times they said the word “immigration.” Voters also deserved to hear how candidates for the Democratic nomination would handle the Trump administration’s court-packing that has put progressive policies in jeopardy for a generation. 

Moderators did not ask the candidates about abortion, the issue that has driven conservative court-packing since Ronald Reagan was rocking a windbreaker half-zip in the Oval Office. In Florida this week, the state legislature passed a bill that would require minors seeking abortions to receive written permission from their parent or guardian. (Because, as the old saying goes, if you’re not mature enough to decide on your own to take Mifeprex on your own, you’re definitely mature enough to parent a child.) Nobody asked the candidates about a court just this week allowing the Trump administration to restrict Title X funding to health care providers, a move that puts low-income women in jeopardy of losing access to health care. Equal pay? The Equal Rights Amendment? Maternal mortality? No, no, no, no. 

Nobody asked any of the candidates about the fact that, just this week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that would allow religious providers of social services to discriminate against same-sex couples. (Biden tried to bring up the Supreme Court in one of the debate’s closing moments but—surprise—was cut off.) Asking the candidates about what is to be done about a judicial system stacked with regressive morons with lifetime appointments would have given voters important insight into their potential next president’s view on executive power and the judicial system. But none of the moderators asked anything about the courts. 

The whole thing was a damn shame, and it’s a blessing that it’s over. Maybe next time the American public will actually learn something besides how every Democratic presidential hopeful sounds with their voices raised, or that Gayle King has cool purple glasses.