CHARLESTON, South Carolina — With every gaffe he made, and there have been plenty in recent days, Joe Biden placed a greater and greater burden on himself at Tuesday’s Democratic debate at the Gaillard Center in downtown Charleston. Each screw-up made his supporters more and more anxious and, therefore, more and more eager (desperate?) to see him deliver a reassuring performance.
“This debate is really, really important to him,” one state Democratic politico said an hour before the debate began. Many Democrats, he explained, spent Tuesday discussing Biden’s cringe-inducing self-introduction at a party dinner the night before: “My name’s Joe Biden — I’m a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate.” While some shook their heads, Biden did not correct himself.
“Blacks and moderates are both getting nervous based on recent slip-ups,” the politico said. “Stability is what he has to regain tonight.”
By the end of two raucous and unedifying hours of the candidates arguing and talking over one another, it appeared Biden might have done just enough to squeak by — enough to win the South Carolina primary and keep going, at least for a few more days, into Super Tuesday.
He did that in spite of making another whopper of a misstatement. To make the point that government gun policies have “caused carnage on our streets,” he said, “One hundred and fifty million people have been killed since 2007, when Bernie voted to exempt the gun manufacturers from liability. More than all the wars, including Vietnam, from that point on.”
It was a crazy statement. One hundred and fifty million people would be nearly half the population of the U.S., all killed by guns. Someone would have noticed. The real number for the period from 2007-2020 was in the hundreds of thousands, not millions. Biden’s gaffe drew ridicule on Twitter, but not a single one of his opponents corrected him onstage.
Biden spent much of the rest of his time complaining that rival candidates were talking too much and ignoring the moderators’ efforts to call time. At one point, discussing China, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell gave Biden the signal to finish up, which he obediently did. And then Biden said, “Why am I stopping? No one else stops.” The audience laughed.
The rest of the time, Biden, as he has done throughout the campaign, tried to take credit for virtually every other candidates’ initiatives, which he claimed to have accomplished himself at some distant point during his 40-plus year career in government.
Biden’s performance might have been seen as a loser were the others not so bad. Bernie Sanders, leading the Democratic race after winning the most votes in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, was everyone’s target at the beginning of the night. The criticism began with a cheap shot from billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who said to Sanders, “Russia is helping you get elected, so you will lose to [President Trump].” And then the other candidates launched a swarm-of-bees attack on Sanders that included so many allegations that he was not able to address them all.
Sanders seemed off balance for a good bit of the time but regained his bearing with a strong appeal at the end of the debate when he argued that his “radical” ideas are not actually radical in other parts of the world. That is undoubtedly true but might not be very persuasive to voters in South Carolina and some of the less deeply blue Super Tuesday states.
Finally, there was Bloomberg. The billionaire Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat sometimes brags about the massive donations he made to the Democratic Party in the 2018 midterm elections. There’s no doubt he believes he deserves some credit for the Democrats’ pickup of 40-plus House seats. But he would never go so far as to say he bought the election.
Or would he?
“They talk about 40 Democrats,” Bloomberg said. “Twenty-one of those were people that I spent $100 million to elect. All of the new Democrats that came in and put Nancy Pelosi in charge and gave the Congress the ability to control this president — I bough … I, I got them.”
To many ears, it sounded as if Bloomberg began to say that he “bought” a Democratic House. But he didn’t get it fully out and then said he, and his money, simply “got” the new Democratic representatives.
After the debate, the Bloomberg team chose to ignore the moment. “I didn’t hear that,” said adviser Howard Wolfson when asked if Bloomberg said he bought the Democratic House.
On the Sanders side, top aide Jeff Weaver did not point fingers, but he couldn’t keep from smiling as he answered the question. “You know, I’m not really sure what he was trying to say,” Weaver said. “I think to many people it sounded like that. But he corrected himself in the process. It’s hard to know what someone intends to say. It’s a very stressful environment.”
As for the rest of the field, the other candidates onstage, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Tom Steyer, did not have much effect.
The polls still show Biden in the lead in South Carolina, although by a much smaller margin than just a few weeks ago. Apart from an apparent outlier poll from the Democratic firm PPP that showed Biden with a 15 percentage point lead, other surveys have shown him with a 4-5 percentage point advantage. It’s not much, but there are still moderate Democrats, both black and white, in South Carolina who find Biden a more acceptable choice than Sanders, who they view as an extremist, and Bloomberg, who they view as an unappealing billionaire who spent most of his career not being a Democrat.
After the debate, I got back in touch with the Democratic politico who said Biden needed to regain his stability. Well, did he?
“Enough to win South Carolina,” was the reply. “We will see where this goes from here.”
