Democratic debate highlights: 6 key moments from Joe Biden vs. Bernie Sanders

As Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders stepped on the debate stage Sunday night time, they bumped elbows. It was the primary of many moments reminding viewers that this debate was not by any measure regular.

Biden and Sanders met with out an viewers in the midst of a coronavirus pandemic, however that didn’t cease them from taking digs at each other. Sanders attacked Biden from the left over Social Safety; Biden portrayed Sanders’s agenda as unrealistic, arguing that persons are in search of “outcomes, not a revolution” in a second of disaster. The variations between the 2 candidates was as clear because it’s ever been.

After a gap 30 minutes on coronavirus, the talk shifted to extra acquainted floor: well being care, local weather change, international coverage, and immigration. With four big states voting on Tuesday regardless of the outbreak, Sanders has restricted time to make up his hole with Biden, who has established himself because the frontrunner since Tremendous Tuesday. These would be the moments that dictate whether or not he’ll succeed.

The elbow bump

In case you hadn’t heard: you shouldn’t be shaking folks’s fingers proper now. Luckily, Biden and Sanders bought the memo.

Ideally, these two 70-something males wouldn’t have left their houses. Alas, the demand for a televised presidential main debate trumped public well being concerns. So Biden and Sanders did the very best they may to flatten the curve.

Mandel Ngan/AFP through Getty Pictures

Proper now, one of the crucial vital issues any of us can do is observe social distancing. Keep away from crowds and public institutions, keep residence if attainable, and many others. As Vox has explained:

The velocity at which the outbreak performs out issues massively for its penalties. What epidemiologists concern most is the well being care system changing into overwhelmed by a sudden explosion of sickness that requires extra folks to be hospitalized than it could actually deal with. In that state of affairs, extra folks will die as a result of there received’t be sufficient hospital beds or ventilators to maintain them alive.

A disastrous inundation of hospitals can seemingly be averted with protecting measures we’re now seeing extra of — closing colleges, canceling mass gatherings, working from residence, self-quarantine, self-isolation, avoiding crowds — to maintain the virus from spreading quick.

Epidemiologists name this technique of stopping an enormous spike in instances “flattening the curve.”

The CDC simply inspired Individuals to cancel or postpone gatherings of 50 folks for eight weeks. These are determined instances. So a mild elbow bump was, on this second, what Biden and Sanders might do to steer by instance.

The Sanders/Biden Medicare-for-all debate meets coronavirus

Sunday’s debate didn’t function one other argument about whether or not Sanders’s signature Medicare-for-all plan would elevate center class taxes. But it surely did function a considerable debate about whether or not it might assist out throughout a pandemic.

Nodding to public issues about whether or not testing can be free, Sanders launched right into a pitch about Medicare-for-all, saying if he had been elected president he would rework America’s sophisticated non-public insurance coverage right into a single-payer system.

“We’re spending a lot cash and we’re not even ready for this pandemic,” Sanders stated. “Within the midst of this epidemic, you’ve folks within the pharmaceutical business are saying, wow, what a chance to make a fortune. I definitely would do that as president: Folks of America, don’t worry about the price of prescribed drugs. Don’t worry about the price of the well being care that you simply’re going to get.”

Biden hit again with a easy argument: single-payer didn’t save Italy, which is at the moment grappling with over 27,000 cases of coronavirus. A rustic’s public well being response is totally different than its insurance coverage system; a authorities imposing social distancing and making certain hospitals are stocked with masks and ventilators isn’t essentially depending on whether or not a county has a single-payer system or non-public insurance coverage.

“With all due respect for Medicare-for-all, you’ve a single-payer system in Italy,” Biden stated. “It has nothing to do with Medicare-for-all. That might not clear up the issue in any respect. We’re at warfare with the virus. We’re at warfare with the virus. It has nothing to do with co-pays or something.”

Biden is in some sense appropriate; Italy has a single-payer system just like Canada’s, but when a rustic doesn’t take public well being measures to cut back the unfold of a virus, many extra folks will get contaminated.

However Sanders additionally spoke to a severe concern within the US: that people who find themselves sick received’t search medical care as a result of they’re afraid of how a lot it’s going to price.

Bernie bats down a coronavirus query about punishing China

With the talk opening on the coronavirus (as a result of what else?), CNN’s Dana Bash turned to Sanders with a barely sudden query: “What penalties ought to China face for its function on this international disaster?”

It was not totally with out foundation. The Chinese government has been criticized internationally for withholding details about the disaster whereas it was nonetheless contained inside their borders; the World Well being Group was not notified till late December, although the virus had first appeared in November. As Bash famous in her query, China punished a health care provider who tried to subject warnings in regards to the virus.

But it surely felt like an odd query when solidarity and cooperation are the buzzwords of the second. And Sanders responded in that spirit:

“I don’t assume that is the time for reparations. Now’s the time to be working with China,” he stated. “They’re studying loads about this disaster. And actually, now we have to work with them.”

He continued on the necessity for camaraderie because the world tries to stem one of many worst pandemics in current reminiscence. He urged america to work with the World Well being Group, Italy and all the opposite international locations confronting this disaster. For a candidate who typically asks crowds to go searching, discover any person they don’t know, and ask what they’d be prepared to do to assist that individual, it was a pure and really efficient message.

“If there was ever a second when the whole world is on this collectively, bought to assist one another, that is that second,” Sanders stated. “Each nation on Earth goes to be affected. Each nation on Earth has started working collectively.”

Biden makes the clearest pitch for his candidacy

Biden — now the clear frontrunner for the Democratic nomination — delivered his first coherent marketing campaign message on Sunday night time: “Persons are in search of outcomes, not a revolution.”

From the beginning of the 2020 main marketing campaign, Biden has pitched himself as a return to normalcy after the Trump period. However that message has turn into particularly salient through the coronavirus disaster, exacerbated by Trump’s personal bluster and unwillingness to take issues significantly.

Mandel Ngan/AFP through Getty Pictures

After Sanders launched into his stump speech about how coronavirus is exposing present earnings inequality within the nation, Biden countered with a pitch for swift motion and management to take care of the present disaster.

“They wish to take care of the outcomes they want, proper now,” Biden stated. “And we will do this by ensuring that we make everyone complete who has been so badly damage — when it comes to after they lose a job, when it comes to not being able to care for youngsters, when it comes to the well being care prices they’ve referring to this disaster. We are able to make them complete, now.”

We’ve heard this “outcomes, not revolution” line earlier than from different reasonable candidates who’ve since dropped out, like Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg. However Biden’s pitch for pragmatic concepts and tried and examined management is particularly efficient as Individuals are in search of steerage from the president — and discovering little with Trump.

There was an enormous throwdown over Social Safety

For some time now, it’s been clear the Sanders marketing campaign sees Social Safety as an enormous vulnerability for Biden.

They’ve portrayed him as a lifelong crusader for Social Safety cuts. They’ve cited primarily his assist for varied payments within the 1980s to freeze Social Safety funds and lift the retirement age when there was a deficit panic, in addition to the Simpson-Bowles deficit discount fee that was convened through the Obama administration. The near-grand cut price the Obama White Home tried to barter with Republicans in Congress would have included cuts to Social Safety advantages.

On the debate on Sunday, Biden really introduced the difficulty up first, citing media fact-checkers who’ve discovered Sanders’s assaults on Biden over Social Safety to be deceptive or missing vital context. (The Washington Post and FactCheck.org have good overviews of the controversy.)

Sanders honed in on feedback Biden made within the 1990s, in assist of a balanced price range modification that might have led to spending cuts for this system. (The Biden marketing campaign would level out he had really proposed an modification to exempt Social Safety from cuts; it didn’t cross, nonetheless, and Biden voted for the ultimate invoice anyway.)

“Let me ask you a query. You’re proper right here with me,” Sanders stated to…