Elizabeth Warren was attacked from all sides in debate - [View all]

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/16/elizabeth-warren-attacked-democratic-debate

The Guardian
10/16/19
Elizabeth Warren was attacked from all sides in debate – and she barely batted an eye
Moira Donegan

Warren weathered attacks from opponents with patience, grace and an agility in her rhetoric that rivals that of a gymnast on a balance beam.
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But the attention was almost all focused on one candidate, the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who has emerged as the frontrunner after a slow and steady rise in her support, and who has crystallized her position in recent months as the party’s intellectual and ideological center of gravity. Questions were framed around her policy positions, her past statements, her agenda; other candidates staked their claim to positions almost exclusively in relation to where Warren stands.
..snip
Warren’s new dominance reflects not only her slow but dramatic rise in the polls, where she is now besting the longtime establishment favorite, Joe Biden, but also a renewed Democratic political landscape in the wake of the opening of an impeachment inquiry against Trump in the House of Representatives. At the debate, the impeachment proceedings provided a brief opportunity for unity among the ideologically divided candidates, with a softball opening question about the inquiry providing all of them an opportunity to voice their distaste for Trump. But the unity ended there. From that point on, half of the stage dedicated themselves to the project of attempting to discredit Warren.

She was attacked by Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg over how she plans to pay for Medicare for All. She was attacked by Andrew Yang over her plan to break up big tech and enforce a strict antitrust agenda. She was attacked by Kamala Harris, who alleged that Warren was hypocritical for, of all things, not calling on Twitter to suspend Donald Trump’s account. She was attacked by Joe Biden for supposedly being “vague” on Medicare for All. She would have been attacked by Tulsi Gabbard for her lack of military experience, except Gabbard was cut off by a moderator.

For the most part, Warren weathered these attacks with patience, grace, and an agility in her rhetoric that rivals that of a gymnast on a balance beam. She refused to take the bait repeatedly offered to her by moderators and other candidates, who attempted to goad her into saying that she would raise taxes to cover Medicare for All. This denied her opponents a video clip that they could use to discredit her; instead, she hammered home the larger point that total costs would go down under her plan. She refused to get mired in the petty point of whether Twitter should suspend Trump’s account; instead, she focused on how big tech companies have too much influence over our politics to go unregulated. She wouldn’t concede Andrew Yang’s dubious assertion that unregulated tech giants encourage innovation; instead, she focused on the ways that monopolies in all sectors of the economy – she cited agriculture and pharmaceuticals – need to be broken up to protect consumers.

It was a frontrunner’s strategy, a deflection technique meant to avoid inconvenient commitments and stymie the attack strategies of her rivals. Warren made moral cases instead of economic ones, refusing to get bogged down in the kinds of specifics that can only be communicated poorly and haphazardly to voters within the confines of the contentious debate format. To make her case in a general election, she will have to become more willing to communicate the details of her multitudinous plans on a mass scale, more ready to get down to brass tacks on television and on the debate stage. But Tuesday’s debate was her first as the object of rivals’ ire – before tonight, her opponents had more or less held their fire against her. The discipline and poise she showed in this new role bodes well for her performance in a general election against the erratic and taunting Trump. He will bait her and goad her, and she will be able to calmly and convincingly remain on message.
....more at link also posted other snippets in Democratic Primaries