A diverse group of 10 candidates in Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential debate in Detroit spent much of the night taking jabs at one man on stage and another who wasn’t: former Vice President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump.
While none of the candidates in Tuesday night’s debate were people of color, Wednesday’s debate included African American Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey, Latino former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro and Asian American entrepreneur Andrew Yang.
Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, who stood on the far left of the stage because he’s trailing in the polls, was preaching to the choir in Detroit’s Fox Theatre when he condemned Trump’s recent tweets. Two weeks ago, Trump told four women of color in the U.S. House to “go back” to where they came from.
“The president’s racist rhetoric should be enough grounds for everybody in this country to vote him out of office,” Bennet said.
Race continued to be a theme as Booker and Biden sparred on criminal justice reform. When Biden was a senator from Delaware, he led efforts in 1994 to pass a now-notorious crime bill. That law had severe impacts on African Americans, who were disproportionately incarcerated during the war on drugs.
“If you want to compare records – and frankly, I’m shocked that you do – I am happy to do that,” Booker said after Biden chastised Booker’s handling of criminal justice reform in New Jersey. “Mr. Vice President, there’s a saying in my community: You’re dipping into the Kool-Aid and you don’t even know the flavor.”
Booker then suggested legalizing marijuana as a way to help end mass incarceration, and Biden said drug offenders should be sent to rehabilitation, not prison.
Bennet largely stuck with Biden as he was fending off attacks from candidates trying to make up ground on the former vice president, who is the leading candidate in early polls. On health care, they said Medicare for All is a bad policy because it would increase taxes on the middle class, as the plan’s architect Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has said. Instead, they favor building on the Affordable Care Act by offering a public option for those who don’t want employer-based coverage.
Biden and Harris again argued about busing as a means to end school segregation. Support for Harris sharply increased after June’s debate, when she criticized Biden’s opposition to the U.S. Department of Education imposing busing on school districts in the 1970s. Harris, who then appeared to support busing, later told The Associated Press that busing should be considered, not mandated by the federal government. She was forced to defend herself when debate moderators brought the issue back up.
Bennet’s best moment came when he connected criminal justice reform to education reform. Until then, education had not been discussed at nearly the length of hot-button issues such as health care and immigration.
This is “the second time that we have been debating what people did 50 years ago with busing when our schools are as segregated today as they were 50 years ago,” said Bennet, who is the former superintendent of Denver Public Schools. “Eighty-eight percent of people in our prisons dropped out of high school. Let’s fix our school system and maybe we can fix the prison pipeline that we have,” he said to a raucous applause.
While the candidates were split on whether bringing impeachment proceedings in Congress against Trump was the right thing to do, they all agreed that defeating him at the ballot box should be a priority. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York laid out one of her plans should she be the candidate to do so.
“The first thing that I’m going to do when I’m president is I’m going to Clorox the Oval Office,” Gillibrand said.
James Marshall is a student at American University in Washington, D.C., and an intern for The Durango Herald.
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