Showdowns? Knockout Blows? Not in This Debate.
It’ll take a few days to tell whether any Democratic candidate rose or fell. Keep your eye on the second tier.
Photographer: Callaghan O'Hare/Bloomberg
Well, that was long.
Those who thought the Democratic debate Thursday night — a marathon session lasting more than 2 1/2 hours — would be important because it was the first showdown between former Vice President Joe Biden and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren were bound to be disappointed, because politics doesn’t actually work that way, at least outside of bad movies, TV shows and Marco Rubio campaigns (OK, it sometimes works that way). Political disputes aren’t actually settled in direct combat, especially the high-school debate version of it. The ABC News personality George Stephanopoulos nevertheless tried to bait Biden and Warren (and, to a lesser extent, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont) into fighting over health care, and all three of those candidates dominated the early part of the event, but no one threw a knockout punch because those are, for the most part, fictional.