The two obvious takeaways from last night's Democratic presidential debate are 1) Elizabeth Warren was head and shoulders above all the other candidates, and 2) Cory Booker was lavished with attention by NBC. Apparently the post-debate buzz is also that Julian Castro was a big winner. I thought he was better than most, but still second tier; Bill de Blasio's performance was more noteworthy, if you ask me.
Warren is believable, which is something of a miracle given how saturated in corporate cash the Democratic Party is. As Warren whaled away on corruption and the concentration of wealth in the U.S. body politic, the puckering of assholes in corporate suites was almost audible during the NBC telecast; hence the necessity for the debate's moderators to lob one softball after the next to Wall Street's Cory Booker.
That's the big picture here. The Democrats running for president understand that to beat Trump next year you cannot let him get to your left. That's why the first 15 minutes of the debate sounded like a Socialist Alternative meeting. World Socialist Web Site rightly points out the ludicrous hypocrisy of this; nonetheless, the millionaires and billionaires who fund the political class are uncomfortable by this type of rhetoric. Recall the thunderous lamentations over Obama's increase of the top marginal income tax rate.
Expect the television networks to continue to boost Biden, Booker, Harris, Klobuchar, et al. -- all the representative of business as usual.
Also expect Trump to raise a record breaking amount of cash if somehow the gatekeepers in the mainstream fail and a Sanders or a Warren manage to make it to the general.
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