Opinion | Debate Night: The Two on Top

It felt like the women won.

Democratic Debate Night 1 featured a heck of a lot of men talking over one another. And really, people, do you think anybody wanted to hear extra commentary from John Delaney?

But Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar were the stars of the night. Although you definitely had to give Beto O’Rourke points for starting off with a response in Spanish that listed all the highlights of his agenda while completely avoiding the actual question about taxing very rich people at 70 percent.

Warren was very strong on the issues — her passionate attacks on big oil, big pharma and big private prison operators have really gotten sort of operatic. And Klobuchar had some of the best lines, including her critique on Donald Trump’s Iran agenda: “I don’t think we should conduct foreign policy in our bathrobe at 5 in the morning.”

Trump didn’t come up nearly as much as you might have expected, although it’s certainly fair to say that everybody managed to convey a rather negative opinion. Instead, the candidates focused on their positions, which were generally darned similar. Only Warren and Bill de Blasio raised their hands in support of “Medicare for All,” but the rest of the group was pretty much in accord about getting to the same place more incrementally.

Everyone wanted to do more to curb guns, but almost the whole team shied away from anything that suggested confiscating people’s weapons. “What I think we need to do is we need to treat it like a serious research problem,” said Warren.

The tenor was, in general, so collegial that it was sort of refreshing when Jay Inslee bragged about what he regarded as his unique record on “protecting a woman’s right of reproductive health in health insurance.” Klobuchar quickly sniped: “I just want to say there’s three women up here who have fought pretty hard for a woman’s right to choose.”

The debates are being held in Miami, possibly because the Democrats are worried Florida resents losing the national nominating convention to Wisconsin. At minimum, it will kind of make up for the party’s refusal to hold a separate debate on global warming, since it gives everyone lots of time to contemplate what happens when a state sinks into the ocean.

Six women are going to be among the 20 Democratic presidential candidates in this week’s debates, which is a heck of a lot more than the old record of, um, one. Feel free to note this is still something less than 10.

But the whole Wednesday night gang was remarkable for its diversity. De Blasio talked about his biracial son, and Cory Booker reminisced about growing up African-American in New Jersey. Several of the candidates spoke in Spanish. Julián Castro talked about his grandmother who emigrated from Mexico. Now, he said, “one of her grandsons is serving in the United States Congress and the other one is running for president of the United States.”

Castro’s brother Joaquin is, by the way, his identical twin. Canny debate watchers may have been checking to make sure the right one was onstage. I once interviewed Congressman Joaquin Castro and he admitted to one instance in which the two of them had switched places to accommodate a tight schedule. Or at least I think it was the congressman. You never really know.

Democratic voters are divided between the folks who are concerned about policy and the ones who’d vote for the guy who sells hot dogs on the corner if they thought he had the best chance of beating Donald Trump. The good news from the debate was that most of the candidates seem pretty likable. They all did fine at the crucial opening moment when everybody has to try not to grin like an idiot.

Twenty candidates over two days is quite a crowd. But a few still had to be culled from the herd due to their pathetic lack of support. This is not something I want you to fret about. When a party puts John Delaney, Eric Swalwell and Marianne Williamson in a presidential event, you cannot possibly complain it’s being too picky.

Democrats, when the first round is over on Thursday, you need to decide who you liked best, and send him or her a contribution. Help get rid of big money and show Trump what a real swamp-draining looks like. That message is not necessarily going to come from the Democratic National Committee, which is celebrating the debates in Miami with a fund-raising lunch for big donors at the home of the founder of Lumber Liquidators.

You know this is serious business. Presidential nominations can be as crucial as presidential elections. I’ll bet there were a billion times this year when you looked back on the last Republican primaries and told yourself, “God, if only we’d gotten Ted Cruz.”

O.K., maybe not so much. But even Ted Cruz would have held press conferences.

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