Former Vice President Joe Biden had a gentle plea for Sen. Kamala Harris before the debate even began. As the two clasped hands and greeted one another with a cheerful hello, Biden asked Harris if she could do him a favour: ‘go easy on me, kid.’
The remark was made in jest; Biden is a politico pro and had no expectation any of his opponents on Wednesday night would let him get off the stage unscathed after two-plus hours. Sure enough, they didn’t. While the frontrunner had a far more aggressive and crisp performance than his low-key appearance in late June, Biden was the proverbial piñata. Every candidate, even the no-names with less than 1 per cent in the polls, tried to hit drop rhetorical anvils on his head.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio didn’t waste any time, using some of his opening remarks to smack Biden as a shill for corporate interests. Harris, the former California prosecutor who treated Biden as if he were a criminal defendant on the witness stand during the first debate, did everything she could to turn the conversation back to the VP. She said ‘I’d like to go back to Vice President Biden’ so many times that it could have been a Twitter hashtag. Harris received a sizeable bump in the polls by critiquing Biden’s past record on school desegregation when he was a young senator in the 1970s, so it was only natural for her to use a similar strategy. She continued to depict Biden as an old, establishment politician who was simply too proud or thick-headed to say sorry and admit he took the wrong position on court-ordered busing decades ago. She took him to task for refusing to jettison Obamacare for universal healthcare coverage. She even pushed him on abortion and a woman’s right to choose, a litmus test for the modern Democratic Party.
It was Sen. Cory Booker, however, who eviscerated the veep in the strongest of terms. For someone who preaches unlimited love and unity constantly on the campaign trail, Booker certainly didn’t have much love for Joe Biden last night. When it came time to talk about criminal justice reform, the ex-mayor and current senator from New Jersey all but pinned America’s entire incarceration problem on Biden’s shoulders. Biden, Booker told the television audience, was pretending to be the firefighter when he was in reality the arsonist who created the crisis by writing and passing strict, law-and-order bills in the 1980s and 1990s. Biden’s vocal support for and sponsorship of the 1986 anti-drug law and 1994 crime bill introduced mandatory minimum sentencing for drug infractions; life sentences for three federal violent offences and criminal drug convictions; and exponentially tougher sentences for individuals using, selling, possessing, and distributing crack cocaine compared to those involved with powder cocaine. The effect of both laws was a massive increase in arrests, convictions, and incarcerations within minority communities, a development Booker cited in order to damage Biden’s reputation in the eyes of African American and Latino voters.
Former mayor Julian Castro, who used to work with Biden as a cabinet official in the Obama administration, went straight after his former superior on immigration. Today’s Democratic Party is viscerally opposed to mass deportations, hundreds of thousands of which occurred during eight years of the Obama-Biden White House.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand brought up an old op-ed written by Biden which suggested women should be responsible by staying in the home and taking care of their families. Gov. Jay Inslee condemned Biden (without mentioning him by name) for voting for the war in Iraq, one of the worst foreign policy decisions in the history of the United States.
With attacks coming from his left and right, Biden held up reasonably well. He clearly did his homework and was prepared to be less statesmanlike than he was during the first debate. On his old op-ed, Biden excoriated Gillibrand and reminded the audience he was the principle architect of the Violence Against Women Act. He fought Booker’s categorisation as a truth teller on race and criminal justice by asking the New Jersey senator why the police department was utilising stop-and-frisk tactics under his watch despite its disproportionate impact on minority communities. He explained his Iraq War vote as a mistake, but one he rectified by managing the US troop withdrawal from the country seven years later. Biden deflected Castro’s immigration concerns, asking the former cabinet secretary why he didn’t register his complaints while they were both sitting at the same table. And if his back was against the wall, Biden used the popular Barack Obama to argue why all of the concerns about his tough-on-crime past and collaboration with segregationist lawmakers in the deep south was a bunch of ‘malarky’.
Joe Biden came into the debate realising he needed a standout performance. While another slip-up wouldn’t have been fatal to his campaign, it would have scared some of the donors contributing to his bid and given more legs to the ‘Is Joe up for being President?’ story. The old dog did what he needed to do: he survived.
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