Democrats don’t have to worry about another coronation. Instead, with two dozen candidates, they are dealing with the opposite problem: a circus.
MIAMI—Marianne Williamson narrowed her eyes and gazed into my soul, channeling some of the same telekinetic life force she’d used minutes earlier to cast a spell on Donald Trump in her closing statement of Thursday’s Democratic presidential debate. Inside a sweaty spin room, with swarms of reporters enfolding Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand, the author and self-help spiritualist drifted through the madness with a mien of Zen-like satisfaction.
Three days after the maelstrom in Miami, top Democratic officials insist there’s no sense of panic. They say everything is under control. They tell anyone who will listen that by virtue of the rules and debate qualification requirements they’ve implemented, this mammoth primary field will soon shrink in half, which should limit the internecine destruction and hasten the selection of a standard-bearer.
With a record number of viewers tuning in between the two nights, a record number of candidates talked over one another, contorted themselves ideologically, evaded straightforward questions and traded insults both implicit and explicit. With such a splayed primary field, some of this is to be expected: Debates are imperative to exposing the fault lines within the Democratic coalition, to refining and forging the left’s governing philosophy through the fires of competition.
History will remember Harris confronting Biden on Thursday, the testier of the two debates, in a moment that dominated news coverage and could well come to inform one or both of their campaign trajectories. The significance in these events was not merely what was said in the moment, but what is now assured in the future.
“What I saw was a person who listened to Kamala Harris’ pain,” Cedric Richmond, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and one of Biden’s highest-profile surrogates, said after the debate ended. Referring to the busing controversy, Richmond added, “All of that was out there when the first African American president of the United States decided to pick Joe Biden as his running mate, and he had the vice president’s back every day of the week.
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