Elizabeth Warren, the senator from Massachusetts, got our attention very early in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination –
She might have been a dark horse then, but at the first debate, Wednesday evening, she was the frontrunner among 10 candidates and had the center lectern to prove it.
And that was the problem. Among nine other candidates, two women and seven men, all vigorously bidding for voters’ attention, Warren suddenly seemed uncertain and diminished. She is surely every whit as sharp as she was in January as a policy-maker, but we had to wonder whether she had the wherewithal to go the distance in 1,000 searching interviews or on a debate stage with President Trump.
It is only the first debate, but neither we nor anyone else, it seems, will call her its winner. Who benefitted, then?
After all the night’s freneticism – it was only two hours, but it seemed like five – and all of the competitive discussion – you cannot really call it a debate – it was capped by each candidate’s closing statement.
We imagined this was the speech each would give at the Democratic convention, in Milwaukee next July, accepting her party’s nomination. The pronoun is apt because the two clearest in stating why they wanted to be president were the other two women on last night’s stage, Amy Klobuchar, the U.S. senator from Minnesota, and Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. representative from Hawaii.
Klobuchar had been dogged by her reputation as a moderate, which is no crime, and stories that she mistreats her staff. She wiped that away, at least for now. We hope she can stay in the race.
Gabbard benefitted tremendously from being the only veteran on the stage, especially when foreign policy came up. It did not make her right but it made her authoritative. Perhaps more people who seek the presidency should try it.
