When
it came to watching the first Democratic debate of the 2016 election
cycle Tuesday night, the American people had two choices.
They
could either be dutiful citizens and sit through two whole hours of
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders discussing the issues while three
other men collectively averaging 1.6 percentage points in the polls
occasionally chimed in, or they could fast forward to the final question
of the night and basically get the gist of the entire event in 90
seconds flat.
Presumably
seeking to lighten the mood after a long, taxing conversation about The
Issues, recent presidential-debate moderators have made a habit of
forcing the candidates to have a little “fun” by participating in one
last lightning round before robotically reciting their closing
statements.
Tuesday’s
last hurrah was nowhere near as entertaining as the one that closed out
September’s GOP debate, which saw Jeb Bush floating the idea of
replacing Alexander Hamilton on the the $10 bill with former British
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. But it did have the benefit of
distilling each candidate’s entire debate performance into one
delectable morsel of political weirdness.
CNN moderator Anderson Cooper kicked off the festivities.
“Franklin
Delano Roosevelt once said, ‘I ask you to judge me by the enemies I
have made,’” Cooper began. “You’ve all made a few people upset over your
political careers. Which enemy are you most proud of?”
The crowd laughed. Clinton cackled off-camera.
First
up was former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee. Earlier in the night
Chafee had claimed to be a “block of granite” who’d never wavered on the
issues. But for much of the evening he’d looked and sounded more like a
block of Jell-O, his voice wavering as he complained about Cooper being
“a little tough” on him.
“I
guess the coal lobby,” Chafee said, a wan smile fixed on his face — “I
guess” not exactly being the most forceful way to launch into a diatribe
about your greatest antagonists. A few seconds later, Chafee was
already hemming and hawing and saying he “wanted to work with the coal
lobby.” The smile never went away.
Martin
O'Malley was next. The one thing that everyone knows about former
Baltimore Mayor O'Malley is that he was the model for fictional
Baltimore Mayor Tommy Carcetti on HBO’s The Wire — a famously unctuous
figure.
“The
National. Rifle. Association.,” O'Malley said, accentuating every
syllable and grinning slightly as he waited for the liberals in the
audience to go wild. (They didn’t quite oblige.) He’d spent the rest of
the debate doing much the same thing — getting a little too excited
about his own applause lines. It was pitch-perfect Carcetti.
Clinton,
meanwhile, was as predictable, political, and polished as ever: instead
of picking one enemy, she picked all of them — including O'Malley’s.
“Well,
in addition to the NRA … the health insurance companies, the drug
companies, um, the Iranians” — Hillary paused for effect — “probably the
Republicans.” No one saw that one coming.
One
of Twitter’s favorite pastimes Tuesday night was comparing the
cantankerous Sanders to other, more familiar cultural figures: Grandpa
Simpson, Larry David, your cranky Brooklyn landlord and so on. But the
thing that stood out about the Vermont senator’s debate performance —
the thing that always stands out about Sanders, at least stylistically,
is his moral righteousness and self-regard. So the telling detail in
Bernie’s enemies answer wasn’t him putting “Wall Street and the
pharmaceutical industry at the top of my list of people who do not like
me”; the telling detail was how he described himself before deigning to
mention his enemies: as “someone who has taken on every special interest
that there is in Washington.”
He couldn’t have sounded more proud.
Last
was Webb. As the former Virginia senator and Vietnam War hero prepared
to speak, he lowered voice half an octave and tucked chin into chest.
For the previous two hours Webb had made sure his mention his military
roots whenever possible — even when it was barely relevant. He wasn’t
going to stop now.
“I’d
have to say the enemy soldier who threw the grenade that wounded me,”
Webb said. “But he’s not around right now to talk to.” With that, Webb
smiled like a naughty little boy, and the first Democratic debate was
over.
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