Joe Biden comes under attack from all sides in Democratic debate

Written by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns

Joe Biden repeatedly found himself on the defensive in the Democratic debate Thursday over his record as well as his personal views, with the most searing moment of the night, and the primary campaign to date, coming when Sen. Kamala Harris confronted him over his comments on working with segregationists in the Senate.

Biden, the Democratic front-runner who was participating in his first major debate in seven years, was at times halting and meandering but also forceful in pushing back on criticism of his record. Those attacks included a call for the 76-year-old former vice president to “pass the torch” to a younger generation, as well as questions about his positions on immigration, abortion and his enthusiasm for working with Republicans.

But the most dramatic exchange was not only over policy — but also personal history. Peering down the stage to look at Biden directly, Harris assailed Biden for remarks he made this month invoking his work in a Senate that included a pair of notorious segregationists. She then went further, recalling that he had also opposed school busing in the 1970s.

“There was a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day,” Harris said. “And that little girl was me.”

Biden responded indignantly, calling her attacks “a mischaracterization of my position across the board” — and then returned fire at Harris, who has faced criticism from the left for her record as a prosecutor in California.

“If we want to have this campaign litigated on who supports civil rights and whether I did or not, I’m happy to do that,” he shot back. “I was a public defender, I didn’t become a prosecutor.”

The back and forth was the tensest moment in the first Democratic debates, which were split between Wednesday and Thursday, with 10 candidates each night, to accommodate the party’s sprawling field. And it illustrated both Biden’s vulnerability and the urgency his rivals feel to start sowing doubts about his candidacy with Democrats who mostly view him as Barack Obama’s vice president.

At a moment when President Donald Trump has inflamed the country’s racial divisions, the clash also went to the heart of the Democrats’ debate over whom to nominate. Should they put forward a moderate who could appeal to some of the white voters who elected Trump but who also carries baggage from an earlier political era? Or would they be more likely to win by energizing younger and nonwhite voters with a candidate like Harris, a California senator whose father is black and mother was of Indian descent?

Harris’ offensive also represented an effort to jump-start her campaign, which started with great promise in January but which has flagged as she has wrestled with whether to run as a progressive or appeal to her party’s moderate wing. Her campaign has for months been privately consumed with Biden, whose initial advantage in the polls is partly attributable to his strong backing from African Americans — votes Harris needs to win to secure the nomination.

Biden did not appear as unsteady as he has in some other recent public appearances, but he also may not have fully convinced Democrats that, as their nominee, he would be able to parry Trump’s hectoring attacks next year. Unlike some of the other candidates, he did not try to interject himself into the conversation.

And it was not on matters of race alone that Biden found himself under biting attack. Rivals on both the left and the center dismissed Biden’s narrative of his political career as a case study in steady leadership and repeatedly questioned the most fundamental proposition of his candidacy — that he is uniquely well suited to unite the country and wring progress from a sclerotic Washington.

When Biden delivered a laudatory account of his own skills as a congressional negotiator, boasting that he had coaxed a tax increase out of the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, he earned a swift rebuke from a fellow moderate, Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado.

“The deal that he talked about, with Mitch McConnell, was a complete victory for the Tea Party,” Bennet said, arguing that Biden had made foolish concessions to Republicans on government spending without getting much in return. “That was a great deal for Mitch McConnell. It was a terrible deal for America.”

And without condemning Biden by name, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, too, rejected his deal-making ethos and called attention to his history of taking more conservative positions on abortion rights — including his past support for a ban on federal funding for abortion, known as the Hyde Amendment. Biden only renounced his support for the measure this month.

“When the door is closed, negotiations are made, there are conversations about women’s rights and compromises have been made on our backs,” Gillibrand said. “That’s how we got to Hyde. The how the Hyde Amendment was created — a compromise by leaders of both parties.”

It was Harris, however, who did the most to elevate her candidacy: at one point she was the top trending topic in search on all of Google in America.

In addition to confronting Biden, she repeatedly chastised Trump, gently criticized Obama for his deportation policies and generally reminded Democrats why they were so intrigued about her candidacy in the first place.

Yet just as Sen. Elizabeth Warren did in the first Democratic debate on Wednesday, Harris also delighted Republicans by raising her hand to indicate her support for eliminating private health care in America, an issue on which she has struggled to explain her views in the past.

If Biden spent much of the debate on defense, so at times did the ascendant left wing of the Democratic Party, as a group of moderates led by Biden raised doubts — and repeatedly expressed something verging on alarm — about Democrats’ embrace of the far-left ideas pioneered by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Biden rejected Sanders’ demand for a single-payer health care system and said that seeking to expand coverage more incrementally was the more pragmatic approach. Two lesser known rivals, Bennet and former Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, introduced themselves to Democrats with stark warnings that Sanders and others who espouse his ideology could damage the Democratic Party and the country’s economy.

“If we don’t clearly define that we are not socialists,” Hickenlooper declared, “the Republicans are going to come at us every way they can and call us socialist.”

And Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, raised reservations about creating new universal college tuition benefits, suggesting that could end up providing unneeded financial support to wealthy students.

Yet Sanders had ample company onstage from Democrats aligned with his vision for health care and much more, including Harris and Gillibrand, both of whom raised their hands to endorse the replacement of private care with a “Medicare for all” system.

For his part, Sanders defended his agenda with plain enthusiasm. From his first comments of the night, he said voters were demanding “real change” from their government and suggested without naming names that opponents like Biden were offering paltry half-measures.

Americans, Sanders said, deserved a president who would “stand up and tell the insurance companies and the drug companies that their day is gone, that health care is a human right.”

The forum grew unruly at times as many of the candidates sought to interject comments when they were not called on to speak, creating a din that eventually prompted Harris to deploy a line she plainly had at the ready.

“America does not want to witness a food fight — they want to know how we’re going to put food on their table,” she said to applause.

To the surprise of exactly no one, Trump sneaked a look at the Democratic debate in between meetings with world leaders in Osaka, Japan. And to the surprise of exactly no one, he professed not to be impressed.

Trump evidently passed a television set just before joining Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. “All Democrats just raised their hands for giving millions of illegal aliens unlimited health care,” he (or perhaps an aide) quickly typed out on his Twitter account. “How about taking care of American Citizens first!? That’s the end of that race!”

Having stumbled in some of his public remarks since entering the race in April, Biden was trying to vindicate his supporters’ claims that he would be the safest bet to defeat Trump. What alarms some of his supporters is that his garrulousness and pride have also led him to display defensiveness and at times caused him to strain to prove his liberal bona fides on issues they would rather not engage on.

Biden’s supporters were also worried about what might be his biggest vulnerability — his own indiscipline — rather than about any line of attack from another candidate on the stage. But attacks were possible, too, and they came steadily Thursday night.

Rep. Eric Swalwell of California used his first chance to speak to target Biden, recalling that he had once urged Democrats to “pass the torch” to a new generation of leaders. Biden began chuckling before Swalwell finished his critique and eventually said: “I’m still holding on to that torch.”

Two other low-profile candidates were just as pointed in their critiques of Sanders.

Hickenlooper called Sanders’ “Medicare for all” proposal unrealistic. “You can’t expect to eliminate private insurance for 180 million people, many of whom don’t want to give it up,” he said.

Bennet went even further in targeting Sanders, noting that he could not even get single-payer coverage passed in his own home state.

“Vermont rejected Medicare for all,” Bennet said.

Sanders rejected the attacks, noting that the polls show him faring well in a general election and arguing that the best way to defeat Trump was to expose his populist rhetoric as hollow — by providing voters with the genuine article.