Bernie Sanders wanted to talk up the finer points of “Medicare for all.” Joe Biden said the raging coronavirus crisis is too urgent for political divisions and petty politics.
Biden’s vision largely won out Sunday during CNN’s and Univision’s Democratic debate, held in CNN’s Washington, D.C., studio amid the coronavirus outbreak that is forcing people indoors by the millions. The former vice president at once took an above-the-fray approach to his remaining Democratic primary rival while offering a plethora of details on how to marshal federal resources to counter the spread of the respiratory illness.
By effectively playing the adult in the room, Biden, a Delaware senator for 36 years before two terms as President Barack Obama’s vice president, scored a late-in-the-game win over the Vermont senator before the next round of voting next Tuesday. Sanders, as usual, focused on “Medicare for all,” income inequality, and other favored topics. But they seemed almost antiquated during a worldwide health crisis.
Yet Biden started the primary’s first one-on-one debate weakly, setting social media alight by coughing repeatedly during his first answer. A dry cough is one symptom that distinguishes the COVID-19 virus from the flu.
“We’ve been through this before with the coronavirus,” he said, trying to correct himself by comparing the current pandemic with the “N1H1 virus.” H1N1 is colloquially known as swine flu.
Sanders’s opening remarks were directed at President Trump, who’s been criticized by Democrats and some public health experts for his handling of the health and economic fallout from the coronavirus.
“We’ve got to shut this president up right now,” he said. “It is unacceptable to be blabbering with unfactual information that is confusing the general public.”
Biden, the presumptive nominee who earlier Sunday extended an olive branch to more liberal Democrats by embracing Sanders’s four-year free public college and university plan, wove in calls for unity as the race nears its end, imploring the senator “to join him.” The pair, however, still squabbled over healthcare policy, an issue that’s defined the 2020 contest.
Sanders has repeatedly warned the coronavirus will expose “incredible weakness and dysfunctionality” in the country’s healthcare and insurance system.
“You have a single-payer system in Italy, it didn’t work there,” Biden shot back, at times mistakenly mentioning SARS. Italy is the European country hardest hit by the coronavirus.
He added: “This is a national crisis. I don’t want to get this into a back-and-forth in terms of our politics here.”
But Sanders wasn’t immune to verbal flubs, repeatedly referring to the current outbreak as the “Ebola crisis,” which peaked between 2013 and 2016.
The duo also clashed over the economic response to the coronavirus.
“We need to stabilize the economy, but we can’t repeat what we did in 2008,” Sanders said. “As a result of the virus here, the coronavirus, what we have got to do also is understand the economy and how unjust and unfair it is that so few have so much and so many have so little.”
Biden, who made news by promising to choose a woman running mate and appoint a black female Supreme Court justice, countered with a modified line from his stump speech: “People are looking for results, not a revolution. They want to deal with the results they need right now.”
The head-to-head matchup gave the opponents time and space to compare their records directly, specifically on Social Security, the environment, and foreign policy. Sanders grilled Biden on his past support of the Iraq War and the Defense of Marriage Act. Sanders also pressed him on his previous stance against a bankruptcy bill championed by Elizabeth Warren, which he adopted Sunday. Biden, in turn, hit Sanders for his positions on gun control, including opposing the Brady Bill and voting to shield gun manufacturers through special liability immunity.
The debate was originally scheduled to take place in Phoenix but was moved to the nation’s capital without a live audience because of the coronavirus and held without a moderator who had been exposed to the illness. Demonstrating good social distancing practices, Biden and Sanders greeted each other with an elbow bump instead of a handshake and exchanged barbs from podiums placed 6 feet apart.
Democrats in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, and Ohio are expected to weigh in on the primary on March 17, deciding how to allocate their collective 577 pledged delegates. Biden leads the delegate count so far, with 860 to Sanders’s 706. A total of 1,991 delegates are needed to win the Democratic nomination at the party’s convention this summer.
