If you’re like most Americans, last night’s umpteenth Democratic presidential debate came and went with scant attention paid. And if you’re idly wondering whether those 150 minutes re-scrambled the Iowa scrum, rest assured that they did not.
Much of the material was recycled from the debates that date back to last summer – most notably, the ritual clash over health care (what’s the hefty price tag for Medicare for All?), with nary a word about how Donald Trump and the GOP are trying to destroy Obamacare in the courts. Some critical issues were barely mentioned – most notably, the fact that an impeached president of the United States is going on trial in the Senate next week, amidst new damaging revelations (like the Trump team’s stalking of our Ukraine ambassador) that weren’t mentioned at all. And there was the dustup between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren over whether Bernie had told her in an ’18 private meeting that a woman can’t win in ’20 (she says he said it, he says he didn’t), which was allegedly so exciting that CNN sought to parse their post-debate body language.
But since this is a time of international tension, with Trump rattling his saber and spinning different lies about why he whacked a prominent Iranian general, I was most interested in how the candidates would talk about foreign policy and audition for commander-in-chief. Most Democratic primary voters rarely rank foreign policy as a first-tier issue, but given what’s been happening abroad, at least this material had the potential to be new.
But what we got, naturally from Bernie Sanders, was the same old.
With Bernie, the clock is always set on 2002. His take is that Joe Biden isn’t qualified to conduct our foreign policy because he voted 18 years ago, along with 76 other senators, to authorize George W. Bush’s team to use military force in Iraq. Bernie said: “Joe and I listened to what Dick Cheney and George Bush and (Donald) Rumsfeld had to say. I thought they were lying (about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction). I didn’t believe them for a moment. I took to the floor. I did everything I could to prevent that war. Joe saw it differently.”
Biden has repeatedly said that his Yes vote was “a mistake,” that he had trusted Bush to practice tough diplomacy, not to invade. Biden said that as far back as 2005 (“It was a mistake to assume the president would use the authority we gave him properly”), and he said it again last night: “It was a mistake to trust that they weren’t going to go to war. They said they were not going to go to war.” But, as he quickly pointed out, Barack Obama subsequently tapped him as veep, based on his “overall” foreign policy expertise, and handed him the task of managing our incremental withdrawal from Iraq.
So can we give this a rest already?
Do we need to keep re-litigating Iraq, on the mistaken belief that it’s the sole test for a Democratic commander-in-chief? I’m in sync with historian David Greenberg, who tweeted this last night: “I don’t recall anyone saying that Ted Kennedy or George McGovern were unfit to be president because they voted for the Tonkin resolution” – the 1964 measure that gave LBJ a blank check to wage war in Vietnam. Greenberg continued: “People like Bernie who harp on Biden’s (or Hillary’s or anyone’s) 2002 vote are stuck in a time warp.”
If Biden’s 2002 vote was still a big deal, he wouldn’t be consistently leading the national Democratic polls, he wouldn’t be leading Trump by six points in the latest matchup in crucial Michigan, and he wouldn’t be so competitive in Iowa – and indeed topping one poll in Iowa (where likely Democratic caucus-goers are generally antiwar). Much of what he said last night – about re-strengthening the western alliances that Trump has weakened; about committing an unspecified number of troops to the Middle East to “contain” terrorism – is generally what anti-MAGA voters would support.
Most Americans have moved on from 2002. What Biden did 18 years ago seems a tad less relevant than what Trump is babbling about now. (Trump, at a cult rally last night: “You go into a shower, and I have this beautiful head of hair, I need a lot of water. And you go into the shower, right? You turn on the water: drip, drip, drip.”)
But if Bernie Sanders wants to dwell on the past, perhaps he should answer a few questions as well. (Biden didn’t pose these questions last night, because there’s no point following Bernie down that rabbit hole.) The record shows, for instance, that Bernie voted repeatedly for a U.S. policy of regime change in Iraq. As a House member in October 1998, he supported the Iraq Liberation Act and vocally said so: “Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator who should be overthrown, and his ability to make weapons of destruction must be eliminated.”
So nobody has a monopoly on judgement. The big foreign policy question today is what these Democrats would do if a terrorist attack kills Americans at an embassy or military facility. If one of them were to serve as commander-in-chief, under what circumstances would they commit troops – combat or special forces? Bernie is against “endless wars,” but can he ever envision a just war?
Never mind 2002, what would they do in 2021? We won’t know until one of them hopefully gets the job.