The enduring image of the third Democratic debate was the empty podium between Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley as Hillary Clinton returned late from a bathroom break. “Sorry,” the front-runner said awkwardly as she took her place.
Clinton has emotionally checked out of the Democratic nominating contest before the vote, preferring instead to focus on the Republican presidential field. Donald Trump, the most controversial of those GOP voices, was mentioned 12 times. She claimed at one point that Trump appears in Islamic State recruiting videos, which Politifact rated false.
It showed in a fundraising email her campaign sent following the debate, essentially describing the appearance with her primary opponents as a non-event. “Elections aren’t won or lost based on what I do behind a podium, so it’s okay if you weren’t watching tonight’s debate,” Clinton’s email read.
That’s good, because the odds are that relatively few people were watching.
But Clinton is willing to throw sharp elbows when she has to, leaving little to chance after being upset in the 2008 primaries. Defending her record on gun control from O’Malley, for instance, she managed to take a few subtle shots at Sanders and damn him with faint praise for moving her way on the issue.
Sanders ultimately wasn’t willing to do the same. Leading up to the debate, his campaign was brimming with outrage. The fix was in. The Democratic National Committee had suspended their access to critical voter data because, they argued, the party was in the tank for Clinton. This pro-Clinton bias was the whole reason they were debating on a Saturday night before Christmas, competing with an NFL football game with playoff implications for both teams.
Sanders was curt in his apology for his campaign’s role in the data breach and he stuck with the argument that a vendor hired by the DNC was mostly responsible. But he did apologize and allow Clinton, whose campaign had spent the previous 24 hours calling the Sanders campaign data thieves, to seem magnanimous in accepting his apology and moving on.
This took the wind out of O’Malley’s criticism of Clinton and Sanders’ bickering too, though it didn’t stop him from excitedly interjecting about it.
Sanders certainly had his moments, especially fighting Clinton on war on Wall Street, two areas where she is clearly out of step with the current Democratic mainstream. So did O’Malley, who despite an overeliance on anecdotes and the need to fight with moderators to get any time turned in perhaps his most spirited performance of the three DNC-sanctioned debates.
If I didn’t know better, I would have suspected Sanders was taking a shot at the Clintons’ well-known 1990s scandals when at one point he quipped, “Bill Clinton… maybe you know him, maybe you don’t.”
Nevertheless, Clinton could largely focus on the Republicans because Sanders is more of a message candidate than a real threat to dethrone her and O’Malley remains stuck in the single digits. And while Sanders’ promises of “free” everything and O’Malley’s idealism are potentially alluring, one candidate seems like too much of an ideologue for the general election and the other a bit of an opportunist.
Neither can take the fight to Hillary consistently enough, so both she can take the fight to Trump.
It’s always difficult to run against a candidate who is popular with your party’s rank-and-file, which undoubtedly is part of what makes Sanders and O’Malley reluctant to engage. But Barack Obama showed that it can be done respectfully and effectively.
In the spinroom after the debate, DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz praised all three candidates for being more substantive than the “cage match” seen in the Republican debates. But she wasn’t as conciliatory toward Sanders on the data breach allegations.
“They information that was not theirs,” she said flatly. She said she was glad Sanders “apologized for his campaign’s misconduct.”
This, more than debates about the wisdom of the Iraq war or repealing Glass-Steagall, is what Sanders is reall up against. So far, he doesn’t seem up to the challenge.
“What matters more,” wrote Clinton in her post-debate email, “is what happens next.” That’s why the podium was empty. Clinton had somewhere else to be.
