There’s Light But No Heat at Latest Democratic Debate
The major candidates agreed to disagree politely in their final face-off before the voting begins.
Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg
The last Democratic presidential debate before the Iowa caucuses demonstrated one thing above all: The candidates’ strategists have learned the lesson of every previous campaign in which two leading candidates in a multi-candidate race engaged in serious negative campaigning, only to find both of them destroyed.
That was the story, for example, of Howard Dean and Richard Gephardt in 2004, when those two Democrats attacked each other bitterly only to see Massachusetts Senator John Kerry surge from behind to defeat them. Or, perhaps, it’s the lesson to draw from the Republican contest in 2016, when Senator Marco Rubio of Florida self-immolated when he launched strong attacks against Donald Trump before Super Tuesday. Or from the fact that the two candidates who challenged former Vice President Joe Biden most aggressively in several 2019 debates, California Representative Eric Swalwell and ex-Mayor Julian Castro of San Antonio, Texas, didn't survive.