Bruni: Democrats have a politeness problem

Graphic by Ben Wiseman of The New York Times / If Democrats want to run their best candidate against Donald Trump in 2020, potential nominees must take off the gloves.
Graphic by Ben Wiseman of The New York Times / If Democrats want to run their best candidate against Donald Trump in 2020, potential nominees must take off the gloves.

Twice near the start of the last Democratic presidential debate, George Stephanopoulos of ABC News tried to pin Elizabeth Warren down on whether her vision for Medicare for All would require a middle-class tax increase. Twice she didn't answer him. It was the perfect opening for one of the other contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination to force her to reckon fully with the costs of her ambitious plans and the profound difficulty of enacting them. None of them took advantage of it.

Warren condemned the corruption of the political process by moneyed interests. I kept waiting for one of her rivals onstage to point out that before she swore off private fundraisers organized by rich donors, she depended on them for her two victorious Senate campaigns, raising enough cash to transfer $10.4 million in leftover funds to her 2020 presidential bid. But no one made a peep.

At the debate tonight, they should grill her - and one another - with less delicacy than they have exhibited to date. Assuming that Trump lasts until November 2020, he's going to use every potentially unflattering detail of his opponent that he can dig up, along with the usual heap of lies, to attack him or her. The nation can't afford for those attacks to be successful. So now is the time, well before the voting in caucuses and primaries begins, to size up the various Democratic candidates' hypocrisies, half-truths and vulnerabilities.

I began this column by focusing on Warren because she seems to be the candidate with the most momentum at the moment and, based on the current state of play, she could very well be the nominee. But everyone in the relatively changeless Top 5 in the Democratic field - Warren, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg - hasn't been pressed by rivals on some matters that warrant more attention.

Timidity won't do. "Trump will be well funded and ferocious," Bob Kerrey, the former senator and Nebraska governor who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992, Kerrey told me. "If a Democratic candidate wilts under the warm attention and criticism of another Democrat, they will not be able to stand up to Trump."

Many anxious, Trump-horrified Democrats take the view that the candidates should tread lightly on one another. "When we know that President Trump will be spending his money to discourage Democratic turnout more explicitly and underhandedly than in any other modern campaign, why would we want any candidate to spend time persuading Democrats of how bad other Democrats are?" asked Jack Markell, the former governor of Delaware. "The difference between all of the Democratic candidates is dwarfed by the difference between the Democratic candidates collectively and President Trump."

Many of the readers who write to me agree with him or go even further: They want to see, hear and revel in nothing but loving encomiums about Democrats vying for the White House. Some of them believe that Hillary Clinton was badly hurt by her battle with Sanders in the last Democratic primary, and that we're where we are as a result.

But her wounds would have mattered less if Sanders had rallied more enthusiastically to her side once she'd won the nomination. And I think it's extremely risky to spare the next nominee the sort of tough examination that will let us know if we've elevated the most broadly appealing, durable, fearsome Trump slayer.

Everyone in that Top 5 has liabilities. It's possible that Democrats would be on safer ground with any of the candidates below that tier - Amy Klobuchar, say, or Michael Bennet or Steve Bullock - who have won statewide elections in red, purple or purple-ish places.

The only way to know is to make sure there's no premature coronation.

So Biden's rivals onstage Tuesday night should ask if him if anything that he and President Barack Obama did, or failed to do, inadvertently paved the way for Trump.

They should ask Warren how she can be sure that her morally just "wealth tax" will raise as much money and pay for as much as she says it will.

If she can't answer the question well, let's find out now, before it's too late. If she can, she's one step closer to wiping the floor with Trump.

The New York Times

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