Elizabeth Warren got her first taste of front-runner status at the fourth Democratic primary debate — and the heat that goes along with it.
Her 11 rivals in Westerville, Ohio, on Tuesday night blasted the Massachusetts senator on her approaches to healthcare, taxes, and foreign policy, among a slew of other issues. The negative light they sought to shine on Warren, 70, reflects her steady rise in the polls over the past couple of months to now run even or ahead of former Vice President Joe Biden.
Democrats onstage at Otterbein University hit Warren over her “Medicare for all” plan from points across the ideological spectrum. Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, returning to the campaign trail after a heart attack, called her idea a pale imitation of his own proposal, which would eliminate private health insurance in favor of government coverage. Other candidates questioned how Warren would pay for the broadening of coverage without raising taxes on middle-class Americans.
“I have made clear what my principles are here. Costs will go up for the wealthy and big corporations,” Warren said during the most crowded debate in modern U.S. political history. “I will not sign a bill into law that does not lower costs for middle-class families.”
South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg seized on her dodge, a move he foreshadowed ahead of the debate.
“A yes or no question that didn’t get a yes or no answer,” Buttigieg said. “Your signature, senator, is to have a plan for everything, except for this.”
Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who has been ribbed for not dropping her Midwest “nice” facade, piled on.
“We need to be honest here and tell the American people where we’re going to send the invoice,” she said. “The difference between a plan and a pipe dream is something you can actually get done.”
Entrepreneur Andrew Yang took a swing at Warren over a past statement where she said blaming job losses on automation was “a good story, except it’s not really true.” Ohio, a state without which no Republican has won the White House since 1896, has suffered high rates of unemployment from a manufacturing downturn.
“Saying this is a rules problem is ignoring the reality that Americans see around us every single day,” Yang said, referring to her pitch for “big, structural change.”
On Warren’s “wealth tax” platform that would slug households with net worths of more than $50 million at 2% and billionaire households at 3%, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke said she seemed “more focused on being punitive or pitting one part of the country against the other.”
President Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, which has allowed Turkey to launch a military offensive against Syrian Kurdish militias, also caused clashes among the candidates.
Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Hawaii National Guard major, pressed Warren on whether she would end the “regime change war” in the region, before defending herself against Buttigieg, the other veteran on stage. Gabbard has had to repeatedly fend off criticism of cozying up to the regime of Syrian strongman Bashar Assad, having met him in Damascus and cast doubt on credible reports of chemical weapons use on his own citizens.
The other notable squabble to break out that did not include Warren was between O’Rourke and Buttigieg over the former El Paso councilman’s mandatory assault rifle buyback proposal.
Biden, who received the most scrutiny during the previous three debates, escaped the same level of examination other than pointed questions at the top of the program over why he allowed his son Hunter Biden to accept a $50,000-a-month position on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company while he was the Obama administration’s point man in the country. The Bidens’ work in Ukraine has become central to a House Democrat-led impeachment inquiry into whether Trump improperly leveraged U.S. military aid to pressure Ukraine to dig up political dirt on the former vice president.
“Look, my son did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong,” Biden said. “My son’s statement speaks for itself. What I think is important is we focus on why it’s so important to remove this man from office.”
Biden insisted he never discussed Hunter Biden’s business interests, despite the younger Biden during an interview with ABC that aired earlier on Tuesday acknowledging the pair had a “brief exchange.”
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker stood up for Biden, ripping the question as “so offensive” for undermining “a statesman.”
“I saw this play in 2016’s election,” he said. “We are literally using Donald Trump’s lies.”
While Tuesday exposed differences in the field, there was unity among the Democratic aspirants on the topic of impeachment.
California Sen. Kamala Harris accused Trump of being “the most corrupt and unpatriotic president we have ever had” and former Obama administration Housing Secretary Julián Castro claimed “a majority of Americans … support removal.” The duo, who were responsible for fireworks at the June and September debates, had a quieter night.
But the most forceful impeachment response came from longtime impeachment advocate Tom Steyer, a hedge fund billionaire behind the “Need to Impeach” campaign who made his maiden debate appearance on Tuesday.
The three-hour debate covered a couple of areas unexplored during the past events, such as the health of the three septuagenarian candidates: Biden, Sanders, and Warren. Other subjects broached were abortion, anti-trust laws, and drug prices.
The White House hopefuls who qualify for the next debate by meeting its more stringent criteria will meet in Georgia on Nov. 20.
