Bernie Sanders Won the MSNBC Democratic Forum

As a lifelong Democrat and someone who will definitely be voting for Hillary Clinton in the August primary, I can confidently say Bernie Sanders “won” last week's Democratic Forum -- as much as anyone can win a ‘forum’, whatever that is. 

 

First, let’s start with what the heck the Democratic Forum was. MSNBC invited the 3 remaining Democratic presidential candidates to speed date Rachel Maddow in front of an audience of 3,000 (presumable Democrats) at Winthrop University in South Carolina. Maddow asked get-to-know you questions, left-leaning policy questions, and basically lobbed the ball so candidates could hit home-runs with Democratic talking points and sound bites that garnered tons of applause. All in all, each candidate had a good night, some better than others. 

 

Martin O’Malley came off as strong, confident and predictable. But in all honesty, he lacked substance and pizzazz, which is a death sentence for any presidential candidate but especially for one running aginst Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.  

 

Martin O’Malley (Photo Credit: Charlie Neibergall/AP) 

 

Bernie Sanders came out swinging on his populist common-sense-socialism platform. He was strong on Black Lives Matter, climate change, campaign finance reform, gun safety, and voting rights. All very popular subjects with the MSNBC audience and the Democratic base in general. Specifically, he hit Hillary Clinton on campaign finance reform because she has taken money from super PAC’s. “You can’t just talk the talk, you gotta walk the walk.” 

 

Bernie’s most powerful moment was when he got on the subject of voting rights. “It has never occurred to me as a candidate to figure out a way that I could deny the vote to people because they might vote against me. And the people who do that are political cowards, they are afraid of a fair election.” He received huge applause for this line and afterwards went on to say, “I’m going to go out and talk to white working class Americans and say, 'why do you keep voting against your own best interests?' 'Why are you voting for people that are going to deny you health care, who are going to send your jobs to China, they’re not going to raise the minimum wage?'” His message of populist economics resonates with voters and especially with Democrats. When he says, “Your enemies, the people who you should be opposing, they’re not gay people, they’re not immigrants, they are the billionaire class whose greed is destroying America.” Americans sit up and say, yeah…you’re right about that.  

 

 

Hillary was her usual consistent poised self. I thought she did worse than in the last debate, but that’s not saying too much considering this was not so much a debate as it was a series of three friendly interviews with a sympathetic host and audience. She hit the same popular Democratic talking points as Bernie though with less fire, but with more specificity than O’Malley. She said she wanted a New Deal and to be the President for the struggling, the striving, and the successful. She also gave her thoughts on death penalty, police in schools, low minority graduation rates, gun safety and on her husband’s support of the Defense of Marriage Act. None of what she said was new or earth-shattering. But with a mostly Democratic audience, the reappearance of these comfortable talking points was not a surprise. 

 

 

The most interesting thing to note is that every candidate talked about how we need to increase voter turnout. O’Malley and Clinton both touched on it, but it was really a centerpiece of Sanders' message. He closed his comments on the issue by giving the most powerful quote of the night. “If Republicans can’t face a free election, they should get another job.”

 

My final impression was that O’Malley will enjoy a nice cabinet appointment, Bernie had high energy because he needs to move some significant numbers in the base and the South, and Hillary is saving her energy for the real fight to come.