Live-blogging the only Democratic debate in between Nevada and South Carolina

I'll be live-blogging the debate here. Keep reloading this post for more updates!

You should be able to watch it online on the CBS News website, starting at 8 Eastern.

As always, I'll be doing this without the benefit of a pause or rewind button, so any quotes I write down might not be word for word, but I'll try to keep them fairly accurate.

My mom, Ann Althouse, is also live-blogging the debate.

8:04 — Mike Bloomberg looks glum, walking out with his head down after his humiliating performance in the last debate.

8:05 — The unemployment rate is the lowest it's been for 50 years. So how will Bernie Sanders convince people to vote for him in November? He says "real wage increases" were "less than 1%" last year. That's a weak response — he's still admitting that wages are generally going up, even accounting for inflation.

8:07 — Bloomberg cuts in and says Putin is trying to get Bernie Sanders elected. [VIDEO]

8:08 — Elizabeth Warren's opening message: "Bernie is winning right now because the Democratic Party is a progressive party, and progressive ideas are popular — even if some people on this stage don't want to admit that!" But Warren says Sanders's team has "trashed" her for doing more hard work on health care than Sanders has.

8:11 — Joe Biden attacks Bernie Sanders for voting against the Brady Bill, and considering a 2012 primary challenge to President Obama.

8:12 — Bernie Sanders: "I'm hearing my name mentioned a little bit tonight! I wonder why!"

8:14 — Pete Buttigieg aggressively interrupts Sanders to say Sanders has said something "false" about Buttigieg's campaign — that he's mostly funded by billionaires. Billionaires have given less to Buttigieg's campaign than just the voters in Charleston, South Carolina.

8:17 — Buttigieg says Bloomberg's "stop and frisk" policy in NYC was "racist." But Buttigieg also has "humility," both because he's dealt with racial issues as a mayor, and because "there are 7 white people on this stage talking about race."

8:21 — Elizabeth Warren attacks Bloomberg for funding "right-wing" Senators, including one who ran against Warren herself. Warren makes a strong statement: "I don't care how much money he has. The core of the Democratic Party will never trust him.… He is the riskiest candidate standing on this stage." Bloomberg lamely responds by invoking September 11, and boasting (with no sense of irony) that he has "the resources" to win. [VIDEO]

8:25 — Warren brings up Bloomberg's nondisclosure agreements with some of his female employees, and there are loud boos from the audience. Bloomberg says he's released them from the NDAs, and "we just cannot continue to relitigate this every time!" Buttigieg points out: "If you get nominated,  you'll be litigating this all year!"

8:28 — Amy Klobuchar goes after Bernie Sanders for his embarrassing 60 Minutes interview.

8:32 — Buttigieg mocks the "incredible shrinking price tag" of Bernie Sanders's health plan. "I'll tell you what it adds up to … 4 more years of Donald Trump."

8:33 — Biden: "Bernie, in fact, hasn't passed much of anything."

8:34 — Biden and Tom Steyer are shouting at each other when Amy Klobuchar cuts in: "If we spend the next 4 months tearing our party apart, we're going to spend the next 4 years watching Donald Trump tearing this country apart!"

8:37 — Bernie Sanders: "Bloomberg has a strong and enthusiastic base of support. Problem is, they're all billionaires."

8:45 — Biden talks about "carnage on our street"! Why is that OK for Biden to say but it wasn't OK for President Trump to say?

8:50 — Pete Buttigieg to Bernie Sanders on guns: "How are you going to have a revolution if you won't even support a rule change?" Sanders responds: "I am proud that I have a D- grade from the NRA. If I'm elected president, it will get worse than that!"

8:53 — I like what Bloomberg is saying on charter schools, but he's bad at saying it because he has shifty eyes. He keeps looking to the side nervously.

8:56 — Pete Buttigieg says: "I'm a little biased on teachers, because I'm married to one. I get an education on education every day."

9:00 — Bloomberg pulls out some prepared sarcasm at his own expense, saying of the other candidates: "I'm surprised they showed up, because … after I did such a good job of beating them last week, I would've thought they'd be afraid to do that!" [VIDEO]

9:09 — Bloomberg is asked about his anti-obesity polices as mayor, like banning large sodas — would he support similar ideas as president? He says what's good for New York City isn't necessarily good for the whole country — "otherwise we'd have the Naked Cowboy everywhere."

9:12 — Amy Klobuchar is asked if Bernie Sanders is right to propose legalizing marijuana, which is weird since Klobuchar is also in favor of legalizing marijuana! Seems like the CBS News staff just didn't do the research.

9:14 — Bloomberg seems to be the only one who's against fully legalizing marijuana. He'd merely decriminalize possession of small amounts while we keep studying it.

I thought the same thing my mom wrote in her live-blog:

I got bored. There's a lot of recitation of proposals, not so much attacking each other. I'm not going to try to provide you with notes on that.

9:34 — Pete Buttigieg (who I support) has been talking over Bernie Sanders a lot tonight, which seems like a desperate attempt to drown him out while he's winning — or maybe a reaction against the last debate's moderators who kept not letting him defend himself against attacks.

9:43 — Bernie Sanders is asked if he's not pro-Israel enough, and if he'd move our embassy back to Tel Aviv (after Trump moved it to Jerusalem). Sanders dodges the embassy question, but says: "I'm very proud of being Jewish. I actually lived in Israel for some months.… We have to have a policy that reaches out to the Palestinians and the Americans [sic]."

9:48 — Biden stops when the moderator calls time, but then Biden questions himself: "Why am I stopping? No one else stops! There's my Catholic school training."

9:58 — Each candidate is asked "the biggest misconception about you." Amy Klobuchar: "The biggest misconception is that I'm boring!"

10:00 — Bernie Sanders: "Misconception is that the ideas I'm talking about are radical.… Nelson Mandela said: 'Everything is impossible until it happens.'"

10:01 — Elizabeth Warren says: "One misconception is that I don't eat very much. In fact, I eat all the time!"

10:02 — Pete Buttigieg: "The biggest misconception is that I'm not passionate.… Some say unflappable. I don't think you want a president who's flappable." Maybe he read my endorsement of Buttigieg, which said: "He presents himself as unflappable.…"

So who won and lost? This and this piece both say Pete Buttigieg was one of the winners, and Bloomberg was one of the losers. But they disagree about whether Bernie Sanders won or lost.

UPDATE: Biden lied, and Klobuchar was afraid Steyer was going to hit her.

The tragedy of the commons and vote-splitters losing to Bernie Sanders

Now that Bernie Sanders has won 2 of the first 3 states (Pete Buttigieg seems to have narrowly won in Iowa's delegates, but the results are still being disputes), we're seeing reports like this:

The basic logic has never been in question: If Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Tom Steyer all stayed in the race, they would continue splitting the delegates needed for the nomination while Sanders built up a commanding plurality.

Many of the candidates themselves agreed, and had started saying so in recent days. Some Bloomberg aides have called hosts of recent Biden fundraising events to dress them down for effectively boosting Sanders, according to Democrats familiar with the conversations.

And before last week’s debate, a Bloomberg campaign memo warned, “If Biden, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar remain in the race despite having no path to appreciably collecting delegates on Super Tuesday (and beyond), they will propel Sanders to a seemingly insurmountable delegate lead.”

The next day, Buttigieg’s team shot back a warning that Bloomberg “will propel Sanders to a seemingly insurmountable delegate lead,” and then, later that day, Warren’s top surrogate, Julián Castro, called on Bloomberg to “drop out now,” too.

But the day after a decisive Sanders victory in Nevada, his rivals are all intent on staying in. Given the general agreement among anti-Sanders moderates that the field needs to shrink, why won’t anyone drop out?

To start, none of the candidates want to get out before any of their peers, if they can still conceive of some sliver of a path to victory.… [E]ach camp acknowledges that the party isn’t split into clear pro- and anti-Sanders lanes like many pundits imagine. After all, the Vermont senator is widely popular in the party, so he would likely continue to pick up a substantial share of support from any candidates who stepped aside.

Still, all the campaigns are convinced they are the one that’s best positioned to take on Sanders one-on-one. Some of the Biden donors, for example, told the Bloomberg aides calling to scold them that the former mayor is hardly one to talk if he’s accusing Biden of helping Sanders.

Beyond all this, there’s no organized effort to shrink the field, and none is coming.

“People have this idea — and Sanders stokes this — that there’s a Democratic establishment that’s meeting and figuring these things out. [The truth is] there’s a bunch of people who have different interests,” one top party operative explained after Sanders’s wide margin of victory in Nevada became clear.…

Klobuchar, for one, has been the subject of hushed speculation that she’s aiming to win enough delegates in upcoming contests in her home state of Minnesota and neighbors like North Dakota to be influential at the convention. But in Fargo on Sunday, she insisted she’s still trying to win, comparing her campaign to Bill Clinton’s, which also didn’t win any statewide contests until Super Tuesday.

Warren, meanwhile, has been trying to position herself as a Sanders alternative by becoming the field’s foremost Bloomberg attacker, even as a disappointing result in Nevada makes her road to victory look especially daunting.

Biden, too, has a tough path ahead, but is convinced a clear win in South Carolina could set him up as the non-Sanders portion of the party’s best bet.

And Buttigieg, who effectively tied Sanders in Iowa and came in second in New Hampshire, is using those results and his recent attacks on Sanders to claim that he is the obvious choice. “Pete has shown he’s the only candidate who can beat Sanders. In the first two contests so far, Pete is the only candidate who provides any real competition,” read his campaign’s postdebate (but pre-Nevada caucus) memo.

If any one candidate is facing the pressure more than the others, though, it’s Steyer. The California billionaire has yet to win a delegate, but he’s polling in third in South Carolina on the back of his massive investments (of money and time) there. Steyer’s critics argue that he has no shot at winning the nomination, and that his double-digit support in the state must be keeping Biden’s down. If he were to drop out, their theory goes, Biden might win the next primary by a comfortable margin instead of wrestling for it with Sanders.

Steyer, though, has consistently dismissed this idea.…

“People are lying now about their ability to win, what they’re actually in the race for. If people keep lying for the next nine days, we’re going to end up in a position where Sanders is probably going to be the nominee by default. And people are going to say, ‘What happened?,’” [a Democratic strategist said]. “You were faking it for all of February. That’s what happened.”

Wikipedia says this on "the tragedy of the commons":

The tragedy of the commons is a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling the shared resource through their collective action.…

The "tragedy of the commons" is often cited in connection with sustainable development, meshing economic growth and environmental protection.… It has also been used in analyzing behavior in the fields of economics, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, game theory, politics, taxation and sociology.…

The commons dilemma is a specific class of social dilemma in which people's short-term selfish interests are at odds with long-term group interests and the common good.[35] In academia, a range of related terminology has also been used as shorthand for the theory or aspects of it, including resource dilemma, take-some dilemma, and common pool resource.

ADDED: A reader questioned whether this is really a tragedy of the commons problem, since only one of the Democratic candidates can end up winning the nomination. I responded on Facebook:

If you define "tragedy of the commons" so strictly that it applies only where every single person in the system is demonstrably worse off, then it's an open question whether there's a tragedy of the commons going on here. For instance, Klobuchar could be worse off for staying in and causing the nomination to go to Sanders. Sanders is unlikely to pick Klobuchar as a running mate or for any other position. If Klobuchar dropped out today and caused Buttigieg to win the nomination, that could be better for Klobuchar, since Buttigieg would be more likely than Sanders to choose Klobuchar as a running mate or for something else (their occasional tiffs would be more easily smoothed over than the epic Obama vs. Clinton battle of 2008, which didn't stop Obama from choosing Clinton as Secretary of State). If Klobuchar could become Vice President at age 60, she'd become more likely to end up being president than if she just stays in the Senate.

If instead you use a somewhat flexible definition of "tragedy of the commons," it very much applies to this situation. There are millions of Democrats involved with this in one way or another. There's no way to prove that every one of them who isn't named Sanders is going to be worse off if the other candidates keep splitting the vote. But if we look more broadly at whether it'll be good for Democrats in general, we can see a tragedy of the commons dynamic in the way Buttigieg/Bloomberg/Biden/Klobuchar/Steyer keep pursuing their individual interest in keeping their campaigns going in a way that collectively reduces the chances of a Democrat replacing Trump in January.

Live-blogging the first 2020 debate with Bloomberg

Mike Bloomberg is finally going to debate other Democratic candidates for the 2020 presidential nomination tonight, and I'll be live-blogging the debate. Keep reloading this post for more updates.

As always, I'll be writing down quotes without a pause or rewind button, so they might not be word for word, but I'll try to keep them reasonably accurate.

9:03 — Why is Bernie Sanders's "revolution" a better bet than Bloomberg's centrism? Sanders says Bloomberg's stop-and-frisk policy "went after" black and Hispanic Americans "in an outrageous way."

9:04 — Bloomberg starts on a negative note; "I don't think there's any chance of the Senator [Sanders] beating Trump.… If he is the candidate, we will have Donald Trump for another 4 years, and we can't stand that." Bloomberg gives the example of Sanders wanting to take people's health plans away from them.

9:05 — Without being asked a question or mentioned, Elizabeth Warren jumps in and says "we're running against" someone who calls women "fat broads and horse-faced lesbians." She's not talking about Trump — she's talking about Bloomberg! "Americans take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another." [VIDEO]

9:06 — Amy Klobuchar (my second choice) says Bloomberg "thought that 3 of us should get out of the way." "I've been told many times to step aside. And I'm not gonna do that now." (Bloomberg surrogates wrote a memo suggesting that Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Biden should drop out to clear the way for Bloomberg to defeat Sanders.)

9:07 — Bloomberg doesn't directly respond to any of those attacks, and instead makes his pitch: "I'm a mayor. I know how to run the biggest, most diverse city in the country." And he brought back New York City after September 11.

9:08 — Joe Biden also goes after Bloomberg over step-and-frisk, and says Obama/Biden tried to stop it.

9:09 — Pete Buttigieg (who I've endorsed) calls Sanders and Bloomberg "the two most polarizing figures on this stage." "Let's put forward somebody who's actually a Democrat!" Another good line from Buttigieg: "We shouldn't have to choose between somebody who wants to burn this party down, and somebody who wants to buy this party out." This leads to some harsh back and forth between Buttigieg and Sanders.

9:14 — Bernie Sanders on his supporters: "We have over 10 million people on Twitter, and 99.9% of them are decent human beings.… And if there are a few people who make ugly remarks … I disown those people." Buttigieg challenges Sanders: "We did this pattern arise? Why is it especially the case about your supporters? … Leadership is not just about policy. Leadership is also about how you motivate people to treat other people."

9:19 — Sanders promises he'll never "reduce" any Americans' health plans, but only "expand" them.

9:20 — Warren starts attacking almost everyone. First she says Buttigieg paid "consultants ... to paper over a thin version of a plan that would leave millions of people unable to pay for their health care. It's not a plan, it's a PowerPoint. And Amy's plan is even less — it's a Post-It note!" Then Warren even attacks Sanders over his plan!

9:21 — Buttigieg defends his choice of apps: "I'm more of a Microsoft Word guy!" On the substance: "The idea that people don't know what's good for them is exactly the kind of condescension that makes people skeptical."

9:27 — Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren both directly attack Pete Buttigieg by name, at length, but moderator Chuck Todd inexplicably doesn't give Buttigieg a chance to respond even though Buttigieg keeps asking to.

9:29 — Bloomberg says "the one thing" he's "worried about" or "embarrassed about" in his time as mayor is "stop and frisk." "It got out of control. When I discovered that we were doing many, many, too many stop and frisks, we cut them by 95%." He talked to "kids who got stopped" and "tried to learn."

9:30 — Biden: "It's not whether [Bloomberg] apologized or not. It's the policy. And the policy was abhorrent." Bloomberg opposed Obama's decision to send people to monitor the policy.

9:32 — Bloomberg: "If we took off everybody on this panel who was wrong on criminal justice at some time in their careers, there'd be nobody left."

9:33 — Chuck Todd questions Klobuchar about police shootings when she led a Minnesota prosecutor's office; none of the police were prosecuted. Klobuchar says they all "went to a grand jury.… Now I believe that prosecutors should handle those cases themselves."

9:36 — Buttigieg associates Sanders with Trump in that they've both withheld their medical records. "Everybody on this stage should be willing to get a physical and put out the results." Then Buttigieg says Sanders should "level with" us on his health-care plan and his own health.

9:40 — Mike Bloomberg is asked why he's said he'll release his tax returns later, when people are voting now. "It just takes us a long time! Unfortunately, I make a lot of money! … They'll be out in a few weeks.… Remember, I only entered this race a few weeks ago!"

9:42 — Bloomberg is asked about allegations that he's made "sexually suggestive" comments about female employees, like: "I would do you in a second." He doesn't directly address that, but generally talks about the policies in his company." Warren has a clever response: I hope you heard what his defense was: "I've been nice to some women!" [VIDEO] Warren asks Bloomberg if he'll release women who've sued him from their nondisclosure agreements. "None of them have accused me of doing anything other than they didn't like a joke I told." Bloomberg says they wanted to sign those agreements. Warren comes back: "Are the women bound by being muzzled by you?" Biden backs up Warren: "It's easy — all the mayor has to do is say, 'You are released!'" Somehow, Biden ends up going over to Buttigieg and grabbing his arm.

Ann Althouse (my mom) says:

Bloomberg blew his chance to make a decent first impression. He’s dull and he looks like death.

9:47 — Bernie Sanders brings up Bloomberg's history as a Republican: "Bloomberg in 2004 supported George W. Bush for president." And Bloomberg said we should cut Social Security and not raise the minimum wage.

9:48 — Amy Klobuchar is asked about an interview when she recently admitted she didn't know the name of Mexico's president. Moderator: "Shouldn't the next president know about one of our largest trading partners?" Klobuchar: "I don't think that momentary forgetfulness reflects what I know about Mexico." She gives herself another quiz: "Who is the president of Honduras? Hernández!" Buttigieg goes after her: "You're on the committee that does border security. You're on the committee that oversees trade." Klobuchar: "Are you trying to say that I'm dumb?" [VIDEO]

10:03 — After a commercial break, they're talking climate change, and it's getting pretty technical, with discussions of mining specific minerals, and some confusing references to an energy facility in Nevada. Warren tries to broaden it and make it more relatable: "This isn't a controversial thing to say in the country, but it is controversial in Washington: I believe in science. We are going to increase, tenfold, our investment in science."

10:19 — Sanders and Bloomberg spar over which one of them caused billionaires to pay lower tax rates than middle-class people.

10:20 — Klobuchar is asked about Bernie Sanders's statement that "billionaires should not exist." Klobuchar: "I believe in capitalism.… I'm not gonna limit what people make."

10:21 — Sanders: "Mike Bloomberg owns more wealth than the bottom 125 million Americans. That's wrong! That's immoral!" Bloomberg responds dryly: "I can't speak for all billionaires. I've been very lucky.… I'm giving almost all of it away."

10:25 — Bloomberg on Warren's wealth tax: "It's ridiculous! We're not going to throw out capitalism! It was called communism, and it didn't work!"

10:27 — Sanders: "We are living, in many ways, in a socialist society right now. The problem is … we have socialism for the very rich, rugged individualism for the very poor." Bloomberg responds to Sanders with an ad hominem: "The best-known socialist in the country is a millionaire who owns 3 houses!" Sanders starts to defend himself by saying as a Senator he works in Washington. Bloomberg quips: "That's the first problem!" Sanders explains that he has separate homes in Washington, DC and Burlington, Vermont, plus he has a summer home.

10:33 — Elizabeth Warren: "Amy and Joe's hearts are in the right place, but we can't be so eager to be liked by Mitch McConnell that we forget how to fight Republicans." As soon as she mentions McConnell, Amy Klobuchar says: "Oh my God!" Biden: "Mitch McConnell has been the biggest pain in my neck for a long, long time!"

10:44 — Buttigieg calls out Klobuchar for voting to confirm a Trump appointee who designed the family separation policy, and for voting to make English the national language. Klobuchar snarks back: "I wish everyone was as perfect as you, Pete!" More from Klobuchar: "You have not been in the arena doing that work. You've memorized a bunch of talking points." Buttigieg retorts: "I'm used to Senators telling mayors that Senators are more important than mayors." [VIDEO starting after 2:50]

10:48 — Chuck Todd asks everyone what should happen if no one has a majority of delegates by convention time. Everyone vaguely says the process should work its way out, except for Bernie Sanders, the only one to make a definitive statement: "The person who has the most votes should be the nominee."

10:54 — Bloomberg uses his closing statement to preview how he'd challenge Trump in the general election: "This is a management job, and Donald Trump's not a manager. This is a job where you need teams, and he doesn't have teams."

10:57 — Elizabeth Warren, who seems to be losing her voice: "Of all the people on this stage, I've been a politician for the shortest amount of time, but I've been fighting for families the longest amount of time."

10:59 — Biden says they're in Las Vegas, "the site of the most significant mass murder in American history." (Well, with one minor exception…)

Mediaite has collected Twitter reactions to Bloomberg's "disastrous" debate night:

• I’m at a debate watch party at a Bloomberg campaign office in Virginia. People are in visible pain watching this exchange with Warren. Overheard: "I’m afraid Mike’s not coming off so well." — Olivia Nuzzi

• Bloomberg brought a wallet to a gun fight tonight

• Amy Klobuchar is about to prosecute Elizabeth Warren for murdering Mike Bloomberg.

• Bloomberg is weak - and he comes across as nervous too. If he didn’t have money, he wouldn’t be within miles of this stage. — Ari Fleischer

• bloom more like wilt

• BREAKING: Bloomberg offers NDAs to every debate viewer — Trevor Noah

Is there a homophobic undertone to Joe Biden's attack on Pete Buttigieg?

Now that Pete Buttigieg has been victorious (yes, victorious) over fourth-place Joe Biden in Iowa, and New Hampshire polls show Buttigieg continuing to gain momentum heading into the first primary, Biden has released an attack ad that paints Buttigieg as a mayor with misplaced priorities.

Biden's ad says Buttigieg "installed decorative lights under bridges" to create "colorfully illuminated rivers," and he "la[id] out decorative brick" on sidewalks.

So Biden is repeatedly trying to associate the word "decorative" with Buttigieg, the first openly gay candidate with a serious chance at becoming president.

The repetition of that word — "decorative" — could not have been an accident.

One of the oldest stereotypes about gay men is that they're interested in interior decorating.

Yes, I know: someone's going to say I'm reading too much into it, oversensitive, etc. I know that response.

I also know that political attack ads are designed to operate on a subtle and sometimes subliminal level.

One more thing. There are jarring shifts in the music as the announcer juxtaposes Biden and Buttigieg. As usual for a political ad, we hear dramatic, soaring music that sounds like it's from a movie soundtrack when the ad tells us about the great things Biden did. And that's fine. What's more interesting to me is that when the announcer switches to mocking Buttigieg, the music slows down and sounds a lot like the very beginning of one of the most famous pieces of classical music, from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, called "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy."

Live-blogging the first 2020 presidential debate after the Iowa caucuses

I'll be live-blogging the debate here. Keep reloading this post for more updates!

Any quotes I write down might not be word-for-word, since I'm doing this live without a pause or rewind button. But I'll trying to keep them reasonably accurate, and I might fix them later.

8:06 — Joe Biden is asked why he said Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg are too big of a risk. He dodges the question and instead says: "I took a hit in Iowa, and I'll probably take a hit here" in New Hampshire. I know candidates try to manage expectations, but it's odd for the former frontrunner to predict an outright loss in the first primary!

8:10 — George Stephanopoulos asks if anyone is worried about having a "democratic socialist," Bernie Sanders, "at the top of the ticket." Amy Klobuchar seems to be the only one who says yes. "We are not going to be able to out-divide the divider-in-chief."

8:13 — Andrew Yang says the whole "dichotomy" between capitalism and socialism is "out of date."

8:17 — Pete Buttigieg says we need to reject "a politics that says, 'If you don't go all the way to the edge, it doesn't count' — a politics that says, 'It's my way or the highway.'" Stephanopoulos asks if he's "talking about Bernie Sanders." Buttigieg doesn't dance around it: "Yes!"

8:19 — Buttigieg says there's finally a majority of Americans in favor of covering everyone's health care — "just so long as we don't command people to accept a public plan if they don't want it."

8:20 — Biden goes after Sanders on Medicare for All: "Bernie says he wrote the damn thing, but he isn't willing to show us what the damn thing costs! … It would cost more than the entire federal budget that we pay now! … When you ask Bernie what it'll cost, he says … we'll find out later!"

8:23 — Amy Klobuchar mockingly quotes Buttigieg saying, years ago, "Henceforth, forthwith, affirmatively, indubitably, I am for Medicare for All, for the ages!" (Here's the real tweet from 2018.)

8:28 — Klobuchar brings up the impeachment trial which recently ended, and strikes a bipartisan note by praising the 2012 Republican nominee: "There was courage from Mitt Romney, who took a very, very difficult vote." Then Klobuchar pivots to attacking someone from her own party, Buttigieg, for saying on the trail that he was "exhausted" from watching the impeachment news and felt like changing the channel to "cartoons." Buttigieg clarifies what he meant: "The American people from outside Washington, we feel exhausted watching the division and dysfunction there.… The reason I bring up exhaustion is because I see the temptation to walk away."

8:39 — Yang on prosecuting Trump administration officials: "If you look around the world, the countries that throw their past leaders in jail are usually developing countries. And once you start doing that, it's a hard pattern to break."

8:42 — Tom Steyer on President Trump: "Is he a crook? I knew that 2 years ago. Is he going to be more of a crook now that he knows he can get away with things? Of course he is!"

8:44 — Klobuchar is asked about Hillary Clinton's comments about how "nobody likes" Bernie Sanders. Klobuchar says: "I like Bernie just fine!" Biden walks over and hugs Sanders to show how much he likes him.

8:50 — Buttigieg is asked if Soleimani would still be alive if Buttigieg had been president in the same situation. Buttigieg doesn't give a yes or no answer: "It depends on the circumstances." Biden is more decisive: "No… There is no evidence yet of an imminent threat."

8:56 — I'm not a big fan of Elizabeth Warren, but she has a strong moment talking about how much she's traveled through the Middle East, including with Republicans like John McCain and Lindsey Graham: "No one can describe what winning looks like. All they can describe is endless war."

9:02 — Buttigieg: "President Trump's imagination of national security is a big wall and a moat full of alligators. It's a 17th-century idea of national security." This is a power move by Buttigieg: he's focusing on how he would attack Trump in the general election, while we haven't heard him attacking any of the other Democratic candidates, even with a crucial primary coming up in a few days.

9:15 — Buttigieg is asked if he supports the "decriminalization of all drugs." He says "no," he wouldn't use "incarceration" to punish possession of drugs, but he wouldn't legalize selling drugs like heroin and cocaine. The moderator pushes back against his answer, saying his website does say he supports decriminalizing all drugs. ADDED: This fact check says Buttigieg "was right, and the debate moderator was wrong" about what's on his website. I don’t understand why the moderator kept arguing with Buttigieg over that, interrupting his answer. Do all the candidates get that kind of treatment?

9:17 — The moderator says Yang has called for "treatment" as a solution to the opioid crisis — but "there aren't enough beds" to hospitalize everyone.

9:24 — Warren points out that there are many gun deaths in "communities of color," but "there are no headlines about those." Later, Steyer falsely claims that no one has said anything about race in tonight's debate.

9:38 — Buttigieg is asked about the fact that the disparity between black and white people being incarcerated for marijuana was more severe while he was Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and increased while he was in office. He admits there was "systemic racism" in his administration. But he emphasizes that marijuana arrests overall were lower in South Bend than the national and statewide averages. And he says he made drug enforcement more focused on gang violence. Then the moderator asks Elizabeth Warren if Buttigieg just gave a "sufficient answer." That's like telling the audience there’s some kind of problem with Buttigieg's answer — moderators shouldn’t tip their hands about which answers they find satisfactory or unsatisfactory.

9:41 — Yang to Warren: "You can't regulate away racism with a patchwork of laws that are race-specific."

9:52 — Warren snarks: "I'm glad to stand on this stage with my fellow Democrats who talk about how much they care about the African-American community — at least at election time…"

Haven't been updating this post in a while, and I can just repeat what I said in the last debate: "I've been zoning out on the rather dry discussion of who's for what trade deals."

Stephanopoulos prompts each candidate to give a canned statement on child poverty. This debate hasn't had any drama for a while now.

And it's over. Not the most exciting debate, and I'd be hard-pressed to say anyone "won" or "lost" tonight.

Pete Buttigieg for the 2020 Democratic nomination

I've watched and live-blogged every 2020 debate so far. I won't be voting until New York's relatively late primary in April, and most of the current candidates will have dropped out by then. But I've been thinking about how I would choose among the candidates who are running now, if I could vote in one of the early states.

I recently posted about how I was having trouble deciding between two candidates.

For anyone who wants Trump to lose his reelection bid, as I do, I think a reasonable choice would be either former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of Indiana, or Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.

(For purposes of this post, I'll assume the problems with Trump are well-known and don't need to be repeated here. I can go into detail on that in a future post about who I'm going to vote for in the general election.)

I haven't found any major policy or ideological differences between Klobuchar and Buttigieg. For instance, they both want to reform health care with a public option. They've each proposed an array of criminal justice reforms.

You could try to find some distinctions among the policies they've posted on their websites — but those promises are, at best, only rough guides to what their presidencies would be like. So there's a limit to how useful it is to go through such a wonky exercise.

If not policy, what other basis is there to pick one of the two candidates? Experience. Temperament. Tone. Character.

Klobuchar's case is a pragmatic one based on experience. Her basic pitch is: she's a Senator who knows how to work together with both parties to get things done, and that's more important than being the candidate with the most attention-getting presentation on the surface.

Buttigieg's case is based on more intangible qualities. He aims to be uplifting and Obama-like in his rhetoric. He presents himself as unflappable and level-headed. He emphasizes moral virtues like courage, which, as he never fails to remind us, he's shown in his military service and in coming out as gay when he was up for reelection in the red state of Indiana.

Common criticisms of Buttigieg are that he's young and inexperienced. President Buttigieg would be inaugurated the day after his 39th birthday, making him the youngest president ever. You could fairly worry about that. You could also argue he'd be in good company: Teddy Roosevelt was the youngest president ever, and is widely considered one of the best.

And how inexperienced is Buttigieg really? In addition to his Navy service in Afghanistan, he was a mayor of a Midwestern city with a population of about 100,000 people.

We've never had someone who went directly from mayor to president, with nothing in between at a higher level than mayor. So his experience might not be ideal. Yet he has been the chief executive of a city government for 8 years, and there's some parallel between that and being president.

Buttigieg's experiences don't come close to being president — but then, no job is true preparation for being president. Every president goes into the job with limited experience. Governors and mayors are limited in that they have to be focused on their own geographic areas — a small percentage of the country.

So, are members of Congress better because they work on national issues? Ah, but the process of a Senator's work is different from the presidential process. A Senator's world is legislation — writing it, arguing over it, voting on it. Of course, the president has to decide what legislation to sign and what to veto. But the president has to operate on so many other levels, interacting with so many different entities — Congress, government agencies that you and I haven't even heard of, foreign countries… It's almost dizzying to think about all that.

No candidate starts out fully ready. Any new president will need to learn the ropes on the job, and will make some mistakes along the way.

Klobuchar has headed one governmental organization (a prosecutor's office at the county level), but she hasn't been a chief executive — mayor, governor, head of a company, etc. Buttigieg knows what it's like to run a government, to set a whole administration's priorities.

Of course, Klobuchar has an edge in that there are many federal policy issues that would be more familiar to her. Buttigieg has gotten some education in federal issues just by being a candidate, and he seems intelligent enough to get up to speed quickly as president. Still, you could reasonably argue that even for the long term, President Klobuchar would be more effective at deal-making with Congress than President Buttigieg would be.

But speaking of working effectively with people, who would work best with their own staff? Klobuchar has reportedly mistreated some of her staffers, who've alleged that "in fits of anger, she threw things—including binders—in the direction of staff members, accidentally hitting an employee on at least one occasion." (That's a Facebook link to this Atlantic article, but going directly to the Atlantic link will count against your limited monthly articles unless you're a subscriber.)

As far as I know, Klobuchar hasn't strongly denied these reports. Her response is highly vague: “Am I a tough boss sometimes? Yes. Do I ask too much of my staff sometimes? Yes.…”

The New York Times endorsement of Klobuchar argues that the focus on her behind-the-scenes behavior is sexist; Presidents Trump and Clinton have treated their staff harshly without catching as much flak. But if you have a strong desire to fire Trump and replace him with someone very different, then likening Klobuchar to Trump is not encouraging. Aside from that, the Times admits that she's had the #1 highest overall turnover of any Senator going back to the early 2000s, and it would be hard to blame that statistic on sexism when it's based on female and male employees working for many women and men.

The question isn't just whether President Klobuchar would be able to retain her staff, but also whether her advisors would refrain from telling her things she doesn't want to hear if they're afraid of her getting mad. Every president promises to choose advisors who will fearlessly, openly disagree with the president, but that's a hard promise to keep. A president surrounded by sycophants could be dangerously unchecked.

It's fine to put this in perspective by listing other politicians who've reportedly had issues with their behavior toward staff, but the fact is that Klobuchar is one of them. And I don't know of any reports of problems with Buttigieg's behavior or personality.

The first president in a same-sex marriage would not end homophobia any more than President Obama ended racism. But it would be a great, historic milestone for America to elect its first openly gay president, just 5 years after marriage equality was finally recognized nationwide.

It's understandable to care at least as much about other barriers that would be broken by other candidates, including Klobuchar as the first woman. Most of the presidential firsts that could happen in the future (as far as gender, race, religion, etc.) can't happen in this one election. But if the first openly gay president isn't Buttigieg, it might not be anyone else for a very long time. When I see him and his husband, Chasten Buttigieg, I wonder how much longer we'd have to wait for another opportunity like this.

Buttigieg is a gifted communicator, and that's essential for the president, the country's #1 communicator. For instance, here's Buttigieg making the pitch for his "Medicare for All Who Want It" plan:



Buttigieg has also been doing better in the primary polls than Klobuchar, including in the first, second, third, and fourth states. The gap between them has recently been narrowing, but it's still significant. Given how similar their views seem to be, there's an argument that anyone like me who's trying to decide between these two candidates should strategically vote for Buttigieg, to avoid the collective-action problem of splitting the vote and inadvertently giving the nomination to a different kind of candidate.

I'm sure Buttigieg is to the left of me on some issues. But he also seems to be an agile thinker and has avoided the dogmatic tone of some of the other candidates. For example, he's made nuanced comments on what kind of capitalist he is and how he sees the current state of identity politics.

On the whole, Buttigieg has come across as an upstanding public servant who'd approach the presidency with an earnestness and humility that's been sorely lacking in recent years.

I support Pete Buttigieg as the Democratic presidential nominee of 2020.

Why not any of the other candidates?

Joe Biden is thought of as being in the same "lane" as Buttigieg and Klobuchar. They do have one important policy disagreement: Biden would merely "decriminalize" marijuana, while Buttigieg or Klobuchar go further and say we should legalize it. (Buttigieg would even decriminalize possessing cocaine!)

Beyond any specific issue, Biden has often seemed bumbling, uncertain, and out of his element in debates. And he seems unhinged when he lashes out at his constituents or tells them not to vote for him. When I see Biden struggle so much to make the case for himself in the relatively friendly environment of the Democratic primaries, I don't have confidence that he's up for the challenge of defeating the incumbent president in a good economy.

Even when you disagree with Buttigieg or Klobuchar, you'd at least admit they go into a debate knowing exactly what they want to say, and they say it well, fairly consistently. The same cannot be said of Biden. There's a lot more to be said about someone with as long and varied a record as Biden's, but I don't feel the need to give him much consideration when his basic political competence falls so short of what the nominee is going to need.

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are so far left that they have little chance of beating Trump. I'm not persuaded by the Warren/Sanders view that big corporations trying to be profitable are the enemy of the people, any more than I'm convinced by Trump saying the press is the enemy of the people.

Sanders and Warren have proposed policies I find extreme and unfair, like canceling all student debt. I don't see why we should give that much money to people who are largely some of the more well-off Americans. It would be particularly unfair to give that money to them, rather than to those who made immense sacrifices day after day, year after year, because they assumed they couldn't borrow money they wouldn't be able to pay back. Something should be done about student debt, but forgiving all of it no matter what is too drastic.

Warren would defund charter schools, most of which are public schools (WSJ link), regardless of how well they've done at educating children. I don't see how that's reasonable or even progressive. The only explanation I can see is that she prioritizes unions over kids.

Warren and Sanders both want to force everyone to get their health insurance from the government. We need health-care reform because too many people are uninsured, but that doesn't make it a good idea to take most people's health insurance away from them. What they call "Medicare for All" is far more expansive than merely letting all citizens use Medicare, and would be more aptly called "Repeal and Replace Obamacare." If they actually pursued such a radical policy as president, they'd fail, and they'd squander the opportunity to reform the system in a more realistic way. (In fairness, here's a Wall Street Journal op-ed in favor of "Medicare for All.")

One of Warren's signature policies is a wealth tax. I agree with her basic goal of making the rich pay a fairer share of taxes; I'm open to various ways of making that happen, including increases to the highest federal income tax brackets. But other countries that have tried a wealth tax have abandoned it. You can see the problem with a wealth tax even if you have no sympathy for billionaires. It would be a logistical nightmare to try to make them assess and pay a tax on their wealth which is stored in so many different places — not just bank accounts but stocks, houses, cars, heirlooms, and on and on. Predictably, the government would end up taking in less revenue than promised, and that revenue shortfall would be made up for with more taxes down the road. (Counterargument: this Washington Post op-ed argues that a wealth tax has worked well in Switzerland.)

Warren promises she won't raise taxes on the middle class, yet will somehow fund all her expansive government largess, but that's implausible. That's not the way we've done it in the US; Social Security and Medicare are funded by broadly based taxes. That's also not how they do it in Europe — European welfare states work by broadly imposing high taxes on everyone, not by having steeply progressive taxes that target the super-rich. (NYT op-ed on that.) Anyway, Warren is misleading voters by claiming she won't raise taxes on the middle class while she proposes a tax on employers' health-insurance costs, which would be passed on to middle-class employees.

Perhaps the worst idea of any of the candidates is Sanders's plan to take the widely reviled local policy of rent regulation and impose it on the whole country from the top down.

I haven't seriously considered Mike Bloomberg or Deval Patrick, who entered the race so late that I don't feel like their heart is in it. I don't want to encourage last-minute campaigns. It's fair to complain that our presidential elections last too long — but given that they do, anyone who wants to win an election should participate in the whole thing and at least try to get into every debate.

Others strike me as gimmicky or one-note candidates (Andrew Yang's main pitch is he'd dole out a monthly allowance to everyone; Tulsi Gabbard's favorite talking point is she's against "regime-change wars"), or have made so little impression on the public that I'd lack confidence in their ability to go up against a figure as dominant as President Donald Trump.

UPDATE: The San Diego Union-Tribune has endorsed Buttigieg for similar reasons, after narrowing down the choice to him or Klobuchar.

(Photo of Pete Buttigieg by Gary Riggs via Wikimedia Commons.)

Which 2020 Democratic presidential candidate should I support?

Help! I can't decide which Democratic presidential candidate to support, and I'd like to take a position before the Iowa caucuses on February 3.

I've narrowed it down to 2 candidates: Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar.

Which of those 2 should I support and why? Feel free to make your own arguments or link to anything relevant, as long as it's specifically about Amy Klobuchar and/or Pete Buttigieg.

I may do a future post about how I decided who to support. But to be realistic, it's unlikely that both of those candidates will still be actively running by the time I have to vote in New York, which won't happen until after 35 other states. If only one of them is still running by that time (April 28), I plan to vote for that person.

UPDATE: Lots of good feedback in the comments on my Facebook post about this.

UPDATE: I decided.

Live-blogging the last 2020 Democratic debate before the Iowa caususes

I'll be live-blogging the debate here. Keep reloading this post for more updates!

This could be a crucial debate, just 20 days before the Iowa caucuses.

It's also the first debate since US-Iran tensions have flared after we killed Qasem Soleimani.

You should be able to watch it on CNN's website.

I'll be writing down quotes live, so they might not be word for word, but I'll try to keep them as fair and accurate as possible.

9:01 — Why is Bernie Sanders the "best-prepared" candidate to be "Commander in Chief"? He says he opposed the Iraq War, and recently proposed a bipartisan bill to limit the president's war powers.

9:03 — Joe Biden apologizes for voting for the Iraq War: "It was a mistake, and I acknowledge that." But Obama was against it and picked Biden to end the war.

9:04 — Wolf Blitzer points out that Sanders has admitted his vote for the Afghanistan War was a mistake, so how is he any better than Biden? Because the Iraq War was even worse! "I did everything I could to prevent that war," but Biden didn't. [VIDEO.]

9:09 — A pretty dull debate so far — I haven't written anything down on the first answers from Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, or Elizabeth Warren (or Tom Steyer, but I generally don't write down his answers anyway because I don't see how he's relevant).

9:12 — Bernie Sanders makes a strong statement: "The two worst foreign-policy disasters of the last 50 years are the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. Both of those wars were based on lies. And what I fear now is that we have a president who is lying again, and could drag us into a war that is even worse than Iraq."

9:16 — Elizabeth Warren flatly says we should "get our combat troops out" of the Middle East. Biden jumps in to point out that not all our troops stationed there are "combat troops."

9:18 — Buttigieg calls out President Trump for adding more troops after promising to "end endless wars."

9:19 — Wolf Blitzer asks Biden if he'd ever "take military action without congressional approval." Biden doesn't answer the question, and instead goes back to the need for "small numbers of special forces," so we have leverage in negotiations.

9:25 — Buttigieg mocks Trump for "gutting" Obama's Iran deal — after his administration "certified that it was working."

9:28 — Klobuchar points out that in the first debate, when everyone was asked to name the biggest threat to the United States, she was the only one who said "Iran, because of Donald Trump." (She also said China as an economic threat.)

9:29 – Biden is asked if he'd "meet with the leader of North Korea without preconditions." What's the point of that question, when none of the candidates would possibly say they would? Biden says he won't meet with Kim Jong-Un, who called Biden "a rabid dog who should be beaten with a stick." Bernie Sanders quips: "But other than that, you like him!"

9:36 — I admit I've been zoning out on the rather dry discussion of who's for what trade deals.

9:44 — Bernie Sanders is asked about reports that he told Elizabeth Warren in 2018 that a woman couldn't win the presidential election. "Well, as a matter of fact, I didn't say it!"

9:46 — Moderator Abby Phillip, apparently not believing Sanders, asks Warren what she thought when Sanders said a woman couldn't win: "I disagreed!" She points out that the men on the stage have lost a total of 10 elections, while the women on the stage (she and Klobuchar) have never lost an election. And Warren is the only one on the stage who "beat an incumbent Republican." Wait, Bernie Sanders points out that he beat an incumbent Republican! This leads to an awkward moment when Warren asks: "When?" "1990." Warren has a lull while she seems to do some math in her head, before she points out that 1990 was 30 years ago. Then she says she's the only candidate on the stage who's beaten an incumbent Republican "in 30 years." I don't remember her saying that, so we'll have to check the video… [VIDEO.]

Me watching the debate:



9:58 — Biden scolds Sanders for proposing "doubling the entire federal budget every year." But Biden's next sentence is: "There's a way to do that…" and then he describes his plan. That makes it sound like he's saying his plan will double the federal budget!

10:04 — The moderator has a blunt question for Sanders: "How would you keep your plans from bankrupting the country?" Klobuchar joins in: "I think you should say how you're going to pay for things, Bernie!"

10:06 — Buttigieg is asked how it's "truth in advertising" to call his plan "Medicare for All Who Want It," when in fact it would force everyone who's uninsured to pay to be covered by the public option. "It's making sure there's no such thing as an uninsured American."

10:08 — Warren says the Buttigieg and Biden health plans "are an improvement, but they're a small improvement. That's why they cost so much less" than what Warren is promising. Buttigieg strongly disagrees: "It's just not true that my plan is 'small'!"

10:14 — Tom Steyer gives a shout-out to the Sanders and Warren plans, and says about health care: "This is not a complicated problem.… We're spending way too much because corporations own the system.… This is cruelty for money."

10:27 — Klobuchar says the Warren/Sanders idea of free public college for everyone "isn't thinking big enough." She lists jobs that have been underfilled, like home health aides and plumbers. Her point seems to be that Warren/Sanders are too college-focused, at the expense of pure job training.

10:49 — The moderator is asking the candidates about their potential weaknesses. Buttigieg is asked why he has "next to no" support from black voters. "The black voters who know me best are supporting me."

10:50 — Won't it hurt Sanders in the general election that he calls himself a "socialist"? Sanders says Trump is a socialist too — his socialism is about "giving hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to the fossil fuel industry."

10:54 — Klobuchar is asked how she'll "inspire" voters with her "pragmatism." She talks about being in the Midwest, and she'd tell Trump: "You've treated these workers and farmers like poker chips.… These are my friends and neighbors."

10:56 — The moderator brings up Biden's questionable debating skills: "The debate against [Trump] will make tonight's debate look like child's play. Are you prepared for that?" Of course, Biden stumbles over his words in his answer.

11:05 — Klobuchar uses her closing statement to take an implicit shot at Sanders and Warren: "It is easy to draw lines in the sand and sketch out grand ideological plans that will never see the light of day."

11:06 — Buttigieg emphasizes that we need to not just defeat Trump, but "send Trumpism into the dustbin of history too."

ADDED:

I don’t like Elizabeth Warren's argument that she and Amy Klobuchar are the most electable because they’ve never lost an election.

Barack Obama lost an election. Bill Clinton lost an election. They ended up doing OK when they ran for president.

When Tim Kaine was Hillary Clinton’s running mate, he boasted that he had won every campaign in his life. Didn’t work out too well in 2016.

It might be better to have a nominee who’s experienced a crushing electoral loss, who can learn from their mistakes, who doesn’t feel invincible.

Live-blogging the November debate of the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries

I'll be live-blogging tonight's debate here. Keep reloading this post for more updates!

As always, I'll be doing this without being able to pause or rewind, so the quotes I write down might not be verbatim, but I'll try to keep them reasonably accurate (and I might go back later and correct some of them).

9:03 - Rachel Maddow lobs a softball to Elizabeth Warren: if President Trump is impeached, would she try to convince other Senators to convict him? "Of course!"

9:05 - Amy Klobuchar says Trump engaged in "impeachable conduct," but sounds more circumspect about how she'd proceed as a Senator if Trump is impeached.

9:06 - Bernie Sanders: "We cannot simply be consumed by Donald Trump, because if we are, you know what? We're gonna lose the election!"

9:08 - Pete Buttigieg on Trump's impeachable conduct: "The president's already confessed to it on television!"

9:10 - Joe Biden is asked about the impeachment investigation's focus on him and his son, Hunter Biden. He tries to turn this to advantage: "Donald Trump doesn't want me to be the nominee," and "Vladimir Putin doesn't want me to be president."

9:13 - Warren is asked how she'll bring people together, and she claims she'd somehow do that with a "2 cent" wealth tax. She oddly uses the word "cent" to mean "percent."

9:14 - Cory Booker is asked what he thinks of Warren's wealth tax, which he disagrees with. Instead he'd raise the estate tax and capital gains taxes. This gives Warren the right to give a long answer defending her policy. This seems like a setup by MSNBC to give extra time to Warren: the moderator's question essentially invited Booker to attack Warren by name. Then Booker has a right to respond to Warren, and that gives Warren a chance to talk for the 4th time tonight, while other candidates haven't gotten to speak at all.

9:19 - Buttigieg says his "Medicare for all who want it" plan would "unify the American people" in a way some of the other candidates' more extreme plans would not.

9:23 - Biden argues that "Medicare for all" (which is a misnomer — the Warren/Sanders plan would go much further than giving everyone Medicare) isn't even popular with Democrats — it couldn't pass the Democratic House. Biden points to Warren and Sanders and says if they get their way, "you have to give up your private insurance. 160 million people like their private insurance."

9:27 - After Tulsi Gabbard gives her standard line about being against "regime-change wars," Kamala Harris excoriates Gabbard at length, saying that Gabbard "buddied up to Steve Bannon to get a meeting with Donald Trump in Trump Tower." Gabbard responds that Harris is "continuing to traffic in lies … which makes me guess that as president, she will continue the status quo." Harris was apparently getting revenge on Gabbard for Gabbard's attack against Harris in the July debate (see 9:27 of my live-blog, including video). So, I'm not predicting that the Democratic ticket will be Harris/Gabbard or Gabbard/Harris 2020. [VIDEO.]

9:32 - Klobuchar quips about one of her Senate campaigns: "I raised $17,000 from ex-boyfriends … and it is not an expanding base!"

9:34 - Buttigieg boasts that according to Forbes magazine, he's "the least wealthy person on this stage." [VIDEO.]

9:36 - Amy Klobuchar stands by her past statement that a woman with Buttigieg's experience wouldn't be on the debate stage. Klobuchar broadens the questions by saying the president doesn't need to be "the tallest person on this stage, the skinniest person on this stage, or have the loudest voice on this stage." (Thought experiment: If a woman with Buttigieg's executive and military experience were running, would anyone be saying she didn't belong on the debate stage?)

9:40 - Sanders is asked about his supporters at his rallies chanting: "Lock him up!" Sanders says: "If in fact this president did break the law, he should be prosecuted like any other person who breaks the law." [VIDEO.]

9:42 - Maddow asks Biden if he'd prosecute former President Trump "even if it would further inflame the country." Biden: "I would not direct my Justice Department, like this president does.… I would not dictate who should be prosecuted or who should be exonerated.… I don't think it's a good idea that we model ourselves after Donald Trump and say: lock him up!" Then he starts a thought but, as usual, interrupts himself: "The next president who starts tweeting — anyway!"

9:45 - Yang: "There are only 2 countries that don't have paid family leave for new moms, and those are the United States and Papua New Guinea.… We need to get off that list as soon as possible!" Yang brings up the importance of young children hearing a large number of words, but he doesn't say whether he'd support Biden's proposal to address that need with record players.

9:50 - Kamala Harris repeats the old canards that "women are not paid equal pay for equal work," and "women are paid 80 cents on the dollar." (This 2013 article from the liberal Slate is one of the countless articles that's debunked that statistical misunderstanding over the years.)

9:55 - There's a fairly dry and brief discussion of housing policy among just 3 of the candidates. Warren calls out the old government policy of "redlining" to benefit white homeowners, excluding blacks. (It's also been used to exclude Jews, but you won't hear that in this debate!) Booker says if you rent an apartment, you should get a tax credit for any of your rent that exceeds a third of your income.

10:08 - Bernie Sanders says fossil-fuel industry executives have "lied and lied" about the harm their companies were doing — "maybe we should think about prosecuting them."

10:11 - Kamala Harris has a good if obvious line on Trump and North Korea: "He has traded a photo op for nothing!"

10:12 - Biden reminds us that Kim Jong Un of North Korea called Biden "a rabid dog who needs to be beaten by a stick." Sanders playfully jumps in: "But other than that, you like him!"

10:13 - Bernie Sanders is asked if he'd pull out of Afghanistan, and before answering that, he goes on a tangent to attack Biden: "He supported the terrible war in Iraq, and I helped lead the opposition against it."

10:15 - Yang is asked what he'd say in his first phone call to Putin. "I'd say: I'm sorry I beat your guy! And second, I'd say the days of meddling in American elections are over."

10:20 - Amy Klobuchar calls out Trump for failing to condemn Saudi Arabia for torturing and killing Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident who worked for "an American newspaper" (which she doesn't name — it was the Washington Post). "That sent a signal to the world that that was OK."

10:31 - Yang makes a powerful statement about the need to reach out to alienated young men so they don't turn to hate and violence.

10:34 - Biden talks about reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act: "We need to change the culture.… No man has a right to raise a hand to a woman in anger, except in self-defense.… And we have to keep punching at it, and punching at it, and punching at it!" I'm not sure that violent metaphor was the best choice of words to make his point about changing the culture.

10:36 - Harris reminds us of the Buttigieg campaign's gaffe of using a stock photo of a black woman and child who were actually in Kenya, and suggests that candidates like Buttigieg opportunistically show up at black churches shortly before Election Day. Buttigieg responds graciously: "I welcome the challenge of connecting with black voters in America who don't yet know me."

10:43 - Booker goes after Biden: "This week I heard him say we shouldn't legalize marijuana. I thought you might have been high when you said it! Marijuana is already legal for privileged people.… There are people in Congress who admit to smoking marijuana." Biden responds: "I think we should decriminalize marijuana, period." Biden doesn't explain why he wants to "decriminalize" it but not legalize it.

10:53 - Sanders says he's tired of Republicans who say, "Get the government off our backs," but want government to stop women from getting abortions. But as is often the case, the charge of hypocrisy is a double-edged sword: if Sanders wants government to get off our backs when it comes to abortion, why isn't he more skeptical about government intervening in our decision-making on other issues?

10:57 - Amy Klobuchar again compares her experience with that of Pete Buttigieg, who has a sharp response: "Washington experience is not the only experience that matters. There's more than 100 years of Washington experience on this stage — and where are we?"

10:58 -  Tulsi Gabbard says Buttigieg recently showed that he's "careless" on national security when he said he "would be willing to send our troops to Mexico to fight the cartels." Buttigieg scoffs: "That is outlandish, even by the standards of US politics! … I was talking about US/Mexican cooperation.… Do you seriously think anybody on this stage is talking about invading Mexico?!" After defending himself, Buttigieg also counterattacks by saying he wouldn't have done what Gabbard did when she met with Bashar al-Assad, the "murderous dictator" of Syria. Gabbard suggests that she was being "like Reagan, who met with Gorbachev."

11:06 - Booker uses his closing statement to give a very personal tribute to John Lewis, the House Representative who 50 years ago was beaten for his civil rights activism. Lewis is shown sitting in the audience. "I will cause what John Lewis says is 'good trouble.'"

11:15 - In his closing statement, Buttigieg reaches out to "moderates" and "future former Republicans."

11:16 - Bernie Sanders talks about his parents coming to the US without a nickel, and also remembers the time he spent a night in jail.

11:18 — Elizabeth Warren says near the end of the debate: "We should have talked about gun violence." But it's a problem if the moderators of every debate feel pressured to spend a long time talking about all the issues that are considered the most important. Then those issues are redundantly covered over and over, while other important issues get marginalized.

Thoughts:

• Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden didn't seem as dominant as they were in past debates.

• Two candidates tried to attack Pete Buttigieg, but I don't think any of that will stick. The attacks just highlighted that Buttigieg is now one of the frontrunners.

According to Mediaite, Cory Booker had the best night; Klobuchar and Buttigieg also did well; and the worst was Biden.

Biden’s answer about “punching at” violence against women (10:34) has got to be parodied on the next Saturday Night Live.

Live-blogging the biggest presidential debate ever

And I'm not exaggerating — CNN tells us this will be "the largest [debate] in modern history." I'm not sure I'll be able to take a whole 12 candidates on the stage at the same time, but I'll do any-live blogging in this post. Keep reloading for more updates.

[ADDED: You can watch the whole debate here, after it's aired. And here's the transcript.]

(I'll be writing down quotes on the fly, so they might not be perfect, but I'll try to keep them reasonably accurate.)

8:02 - Anderson Cooper points out that all the candidates support an impeachment inquiry, but asks why we shouldn't wait just one more year for the voters to decide whether Donald Trump should stay president. Elizabeth Warren responds: "Sometimes there are issues that are bigger than politics.… Impeachment is the way that we establish that this man will not be permitted to break the law over and over without consequences."

8:03 - Bernie Sanders says: "Trump is the most corrupt president in history."

8:05 - Joe Biden says the Trump administration is obstructing justice, and Congress has "no choice but to move."

8:06 - Kamala Harris quotes Maya Angelou: "Listen to somebody when they tell you who they are the first time." She also says impeaching Trump "won't take very long": "As a former prosecutor, I know a confession when I see it!"

8:09 - Amy Klobuchar: "I'm still waiting to find out from [Trump] how making that call to Ukraine … makes America great again. I'm waiting to hear how leaving the Kurds for slaughter … makes America great again."

8:11 - Pete Buttigieg: "A president 10 years, or 100 years from now will look back at this moment and conclude either that no one is above the law, or that the president can get away with anything."

8:12 - Tulsi Gabbard sounds the most skeptical of anyone about impeachment. She emphasizes that she supports an "impeachment inquiry" specifically into the Ukraine call, but complains about those who wanted to impeach Trump from day 1.

8:14 - Tom Steyer starts his first debate by saying: "Every candidate here is more decent and patriotic than the criminal in the White House."

8:15 - Andrew Yang dodges the impeachment question, and pivots to arguing that Ohio, the state they're in, voted for Trump by 8 percentage points because of manufacturing jobs disappearing.

8:18 - Biden is asked about the controversy swirling around his son Hunter. "I never discussed a single thing with my son about anything having to do with Ukraine." Biden adds that Trump "doesn't want me to be the candidate … because he knows that I will beat him like a drum."

[VIDEO of some of the candidates on impeachment.]

8:20 - Moving on from impeachment, Elizabeth Warren is asked if she'll raise taxes on the middle class to pay for her health care plan. She doesn't quite answer the question; she says that "costs" will go up for "the wealthy" and big corporations, but "costs" will go down for the middle class. Of course, "costs" and "taxes" are very different things.

8:23 - Buttigieg calls out Warren's failure to answer that question: "Your signature, Senator, is to have a plan for everything — except this!" Then Buttigieg pivots to arguing for "Medicare for all who want it." Warren comes back that Buttigieg's plan is really "Medicare for all who can afford it."

8:26 - Bernie Sanders on his bill: "Premiums are gone! Copayments are gone! Deductibles are gone! … We're gonna do better than the Canadians do, and that is what they've managed to do.… I do think it's appropriate to acknowledge that taxes will go up." But he argues that most people's taxes will go up less than their premiums will go down.

8:27 - Amy Klobuchar chimes in: "At least Bernie's being honest here and saying that taxes are going to go up. And I'm sorry, Elizabeth, but you are not saying that." [VIDEO.]

8:30 - Without mentioning Buttigieg, Biden suggests that Buttigieg's health care plan is really "the Biden plan."

8:31 - There's some visible tension between Sanders and Biden: Biden is talking while physically putting his finger on Sanders's arm, and Sanders keeps raising his hand to respond to Biden.

8:32 - Kamala Harris makes a strong statement that the health care discussions in all the debates have been failing to include women's access to abortion.

8:34 - Andrew Yang is asked, since he wants to give $1,000 a month to all Americans, whether he supports Bernie Sanders's "federal jobs guarantee." No, Yang says: "Most Americans do not want to work for the federal government." Yang imagines the Sanders plan will lead to "failed retraining programs and jobs that no one wants," while Yang's plan of simply handing out money would empower individuals to make the best choices for them. [VIDEO of that answer, in the middle of a clip of "everything Yang said" at the debate.]

8:40 - Elizabeth Warren reaches out to Andrew Yang supporters by saying her plan to expand Social Security is similar to his $1,000 a month plan, and would help Yang's wife, who Yang mentioned earlier is taking care of their two sons full time.

8:41 - Tulsi Gabbard: "I agree with my friend Andrew Yang. I think universal basic income is a good idea."

8:43 - Cory Booker claims that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would give workers more money than giving everyone $1,000 a month.

8:45 - Bernie Sanders is asked about his statement that "billionaires should not exist." Does he want to "tax billionaires out of existence?" Sanders says: "We cannot afford a billionaire class whose greed and corruption has been at war with the working class for 45 years."

8:48 - A moderator points out that Steyer is the only billionaire on the stage. But Steyer says Bernie Sanders is right: "There have been 40 years when corporations have bought this government, and those 40 years have meant an attack on working people.… It's absolutely wrong."

8:50 - Biden goes meta: "These debates are kind of crazy, because everybody tries to squeeze everything into every answer!"

8:52 - Elizabeth Warren goes very negative about everyone else except Bernie Sanders, saying the rest of them won't support a wealth tax but want to protect billionaires. This gets a lot of pushback: Biden and Klobuchar both say none of them want to protect billionaires; Klobuchar adds that she's open to a wealth tax; and Buttigieg says: "I'm all for a wealth tax!"

8:57 - Yang says Warren's principles are right, and a wealth tax sounds good in theory — but numerous countries that have tried it (including Germany, France, and Sweden) have repealed it because it didn't work.

8:58 - Beto O'Rourke goes after Elizabeth Warren: "Sometimes I think that Senator Warren is more interested in being punitive and putting different parts of the country against each other than in coming up with solutions." (Not sure if I got the end of that quote right — I should go back later.) Warren responds: "I'm really shocked at the notion that anyone thinks I'm punitive!"

9:02 - Cory Booker worries about "how we talk about each other in this debate." He suggests that "tearing each other down because we have a different plan" will prevent them from making Trump a one-term president.

9:11 - Tulsi Gabbard is asked about Trump's movement of troops in Syria in a way that allowed Turkey to invade. "Donald Trump has the blood of the Kurds on his hands — but so do many politicians from both parties, who supported this regime-change war which started in 2011."

9:13 - Buttigieg says Gabbard is "dead wrong": "The slaughter in Syria is not a consequence of American presence." Buttigieg gets impassioned as he talks about being deployed to Afghanistan and knowing that the American flag on his uniform was keeping him safe because our friends and allies knew we kept our word, which Trump has undermined. "You might as well take away their body armor next."

9:20 - Kamala Harris says there are 4 winners from Trump's Syria policy: "Russia, Assad, Iran, and ISIS."

9:21 - Castro might have the line of the night: "Think about how absurd it is that Donald Trump is caging kids on the border, and effectively letting ISIS go free."

9:24 - Another touchy-feely moment between Biden and Sanders: Biden says Trump is saying comforting words to Vladimir Putin while pointing directly at Sanders, who says: "Are you saying I'm Putin?" Biden says, "No!" — and they hug each other.

9:31 - Anderson Cooper asks Beto how he'd enforce his promise from the last debate that he'll confiscate Americans' AR-15s and AK-47s, given that he's admitted the government isn't going to be "going door to door" looking for these guns. So … what's Beto's response? He'd ban guns and … hope everyone follows the law? Is that supposed to be based on the honor system or what? Buttigieg points out that Beto just admitted he doesn't know how his promise can be put into action. This leads to an extended, heated back and forth between Buttigieg and Beto. Buttigieg stares at Beto and tells him: "I don't need lessons from you on courage — political or personal." [VIDEO.]

9:38 - Klobuchar is asked why she supports a "voluntary buyback" instead of a "mandatory buyback." She brushes aside that question and speaks to the broader issue of guns: "The American people are with us.… Let's not mess this up!"

9:41 - Kamala Harris reruns a line she already used in an earlier debate: "I have looked at more autopsy photos than I care to tell you."

9:42 - Biden says he's the only person on the stage who's "taken on the NRA and won." This should be a good moment for him in the debate, but he goes on to mangle his words so much it's hard to listen to him.

9:44 - Castro argues that we shouldn't have a mandatory buyback because it would mean "police officers going door to door" and using violence against people in their own homes.

9:45 - Klobuchar quotes an email by a pharma company executive on opioids: "Keep pumping them out — they're eating them like Doritos!"

9:51 - Kamala Harris would criminally prosecute pharma executives who've sold opioids: "They are nothing more than some high-level dope dealers!"

9:55 - Moderator Erin Burnett asks Biden about the fact that he'll turn 80 in his first term if he's elected. "One of the reasons I'm running is because of my age and experience. With it comes wisdom.… I know what has to be done. I've done it before.… I will not need any on-the-job training."

9:57 - Similarly, Burnett points out that Elizabeth Warren would be the oldest president ever to take office. "I will out-work, out-organize, and outlast anyone — and that includes Donald Trump, Mike Pence, or whoever the Republicans get stuck with!" [VIDEO.]

9:59 - 38-year-old Tulsi Gabbard is asked about how she'd be the youngest president ever. She talks about her military experience and that she's on various foreign-policy-related House committees. Then she pivots to asking Elizabeth Warren about "her experience to serve as Commander-in-Chief," but the moderator cuts to a commercial. (My understanding is that candidates aren't usually allowed to ask each other direct questions in the debates.)

10:06 - Yang suggests that there are good reasons why certain tech companies are so dominant: "There's a reason no one's using Bing today. Sorry, Microsoft, it's true!"

10:09 - Beto says he'd treat social-media companies as "publishers" — but he won't call out a particular company to be broken up, as Trump has done.

10:13 - Kamala Harris calls for Twitter to ban Trump's account, and calls on Elizabeth Warren to join her on this. Warren: "No!" [VIDEO.]

10:18 - Yang says we should be getting money back for the data we give to companies like Facebook.

10:23 - Tulsi Gabbard sounds relatively conservative on abortion, endorsing the Clinton-era line that it should be "safe, legal, and rare," and saying it should be illegal in the third trimester "unless the life or severe health consequences of the woman are at risk."

10:25 - Pete Buttigieg suggests various reforms to "depoliticize" the Supreme Court, including term limits, or adding judges who can be added only by the unanimous agreement of the existing 9.

10:30 - Biden makes a shocking statement: "I'm the only person on this stage who's gotten anything really big done!" Then he botches one of his examples when he starts to say, "I ended Roe…"

10:31 - The 3 top-polling candidates use up a lot of time talking amongst each other, maybe as a tactic to prevent lesser candidates from getting too much time. Biden decides that now is the time to go back to his disagreements with Sanders on health care (I thought that was hours ago!), and then Sanders brings up Biden's position on the Iraq War. Biden repeatedly jabs his hand at Warren and shouts at her: "I got you votes!" [VIDEO.]

10:35 - Buttigieg quips that if he had a dollar for every "argument like this" he's heard, he could pay for college for everyone. I guess he's referring to the bickering among the top 3 candidates, but I don't know if he's the best person to be calling out other candidates for fighting too much, after his tiffs with Warren, and Gabbard, and Beto…

10:45 - As the last question, Anderson Cooper asks every candidate to tell us about a friendship they had with someone surprisingly different from themselves. (This was prompted by Ellen DeGeneres defending her friendship with George W. Bush.) Amy Klobuchar says "it's John McCain, and I miss him every day." She remembers seeing McCain near the end of his life, when he could hardly speak, pointing to a written sentence: "There is nothing more liberating in life than fighting for a cause larger than yourself." What Klobuchar learned from this: "We need to not just change our policy, but change the way we talk to each other."

11:05 - Biden gives the last answer of the night, and he's the 3rd person to name John McCain as a friend he had strong differences with. Biden says he told McCain: "You never saw a war you didn't want to fight." McCain came back: "You never saw a problem you didn't want to solve."

Thoughts:

• Was this the first debate where Biden didn't make some huge blunder? He still has trouble getting through an answer, but he's stopped cutting himself off mid-sentence or seeming to dismiss what he just said.

• Elizabeth Warren seemed weaker than in past debates; she was constantly under fire.

• Pete Buttigieg was getting into fights with everyone.

• I'm not a big fan of Kamala Harris, but I'd say it was her best debate. Amy Klobuchar was also strong.

• Bernie Sanders accomplished his main goal: convince us that he hasn't lost any energy after his heart attack.

• Andrew Yang often seemed to be in his own world focused on tech issues, and not interested in talking about the major topics like impeachment. But he was good at calling out some of the more questionable policies: Warren's wealth tax and Sanders's federal jobs guarantee.

• Tulsi Gabbard very much seemed to stand apart from the others, most obviously when she emphasized her support for some abortion restrictions.

• I'm not sure what Beto is still doing in this race; I usually tuned him out. Castro got very little time and largely seemed irrelevant, except for his one great line (see 9:21).

• Cory Booker mentioned being vegan almost as much as he usually mentions living in a lower-income neighborhood. Those are great things to talk about, but I think he'll need something more to give new life to his campaign.

UPDATE: CNN gave Elizabeth Warren far more time than any other candidate last night. Even with a dozen candidates on the stage, she spoke for about 23 minutes. If every candidate got that much, the debate could have lasted around 5 hours instead of 3 (with moderators taking some time to ask questions).

Tulsi Gabbard and Julián Castro each got about 8 and a half minutes. Those 2 candidates combined got about 6 minutes less than Warren. If CNN had limited everyone’s time so strictly, the debate could have taken more like 2 hours instead of 3.

UPDATE: After watching the debate, Daniel Henninger writes in the Wall Street Journal that "Joe Biden Isn't Going to Make It":

With Mr. Trump’s decision to pull American troops away from the Syrian Kurds, he opened one of the most significant political vulnerabilities of his presidency. It was an opportunity for Mr. Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to show some foreign-policy smarts and president-like leadership. Instead we got this:

“What I would do is I would be making it real clear to Assad that, in fact, where he’s going to have a problem—because Turkey is the real problem here. And I would be having a real lockdown conversation with Erdogan and letting him know that he’s going to pay a heavy price for what he has done now. Pay that price.”

It fell to Pete Buttigieg, the mayor from South Bend, to produce the night’s most stinging critique of President Trump: “What we were doing in Syria was keeping our word. Part of what makes it possible for the United States to get people to put their lives on the line to back us up is the idea that we will back them up, too.”

That was good. Joe Biden somehow couldn’t figure out how to say anything like it.

Then during the health-care segment, Mr. Biden said, “The plan we’re hearing discussed is the Biden plan.” Then he said, “The plan is going to cost at least $30 trillion over 10 years,” with no indication that now he was talking about Elizabeth Warren’s plan, not his.

Here’s a single Biden sentence from the debate: “I would eliminate the capital gains tax—I would raise the capital gains tax to the highest rate, of 39.5%.” …

Mr. Biden’s supporters say he did fine, but fine isn’t going to be good enough. With apologies, a sports metaphor is apt. Joe Biden looks like a pro in training camp—running at half speed, joshing with teammates, showing brief flashes of former skills. Democrats who think Mr. Biden will get better than this training-camp competence are deluding themselves.