I struggled through most of the 4 hours of debates spread across 2 nights.  As expected, it was mostly a competition between 20 people on how best they can rule over others.

And in order to rule, they must pander, and pander they did.  There were continual promises of free stuff and executive orders to make things right in the world.

I watched the debates so that I could write about them here.  It is also a form of self-defense.  I want to know what to be prepared for in the future. I also enjoy the political theater, despite the fact that I despise political power.

While the candidates were supposedly randomly chosen for each night, the heavy hitters (at least according to the polls) appeared on the second night.  This featured Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg.  They were the most notable.

The first night had Elizabeth Warren.  She was the top-polling candidate for that night.  Tulsi Gabbard also participated on the first night, and I will have more on her in a bit.

It is hard to get into the mind of a leftist, but I can still somewhat detect who might come across as genuine to the typical Democrat voter.  I can detect who comes across as confident and “presidential”.

I think there are a couple of groups within the party itself.  It is like there are primaries inside the primaries.  It is not unlike what happened with the Republicans in 2015/ 2016.

There is a faction of establishment candidates.  Joe Biden is at the top of this list.  But I think Kamala Harris will take on Biden as the establishment favorite.  While I thought her positions were scary, she was impressive and articulate, or at least I could see others viewing her that way.

Now, she is a leftist to be sure.  When Harris was asked whether the candidates should have to explain how they would pay for every item they proposed (which is a lot) she didn’t really answer the question directly.  But she did present in her answer a proposal for a $500 per month tax credit for any family making under $100,000 per year.

I’m not sure what happens if you make $100,001 in a year.  Are you out your 6 grand then?

I don’t look at a tax cut as a government expense as many do.  But her answer just added to the list of free stuff instead of answering how the “free” stuff would actually be paid for.  A tax credit is not the same as a tax deduction.  This means that many people who pay little or no federal income tax would still get the $500 per month.  She is not proposing any cuts in the budget anywhere else, so this would just add to the already-large deficit.  It is a populist move to be sure, but it just added to the idea of there being a free lunch.

Harris took aim at Joe Biden on the issue of race.  She knows she is in competition with Biden for the establishment wing of the Democratic Party.  She attacked him for his vote a long time ago on school busing.

The crazy thing is that Biden actually took a decentralist position in defending his vote on busing at a federal level.  He told Harris that she should blame her local city council.  His vote was just not to involve the federal government.  If only he would take this position on other issues.

The other main group is the so-called progressives.  It is the hard left.  Some of them are self-identified socialists.  I don’t think they are pure socialists.  They just want a much bigger welfare state.  I don’t think they literally want the government to own everything.  Maybe they want the government to control everything, but that is more fascism than socialism.  That word is not as popular.

Bernie Sanders is vying for the top spot in the progressive wing.  His main challenger is Elizabeth Warren.

I just find it hard to believe that Elizabeth Warren has a chance.  She comes across as such a phony to me.  She is not charismatic.  If she got the nomination, the show between her and Trump would be something between a comedy and a circus.  I can just imagine Trump continually calling her Senator Pocahontas.

Not every candidate fits perfectly between these two groups.  Biden and Harris still try to appeal to the far left, or at least make themselves acceptable.  Sanders and Warren still try to make themselves acceptable to the establishment, and I think they mostly are acceptable to the establishment at this point.

Some of the other candidates try to play both sides.  If you look back at the Republican debates, you can see this with certain candidates.  Marco Rubio was an establishment candidate, but he had some rhetoric that was there to appeal to the conservative wing of the party.

I am not going to go through every candidate.  There were just a few notable things from my point of view.

Beto O’Rourke was asked if he favored a top marginal income tax rate of 70%.  He proceeded to speak in Spanish and avoided the question.  When asked again if he wanted to answer the question, he still couldn’t manage to do it.

He tried his pandering to Latino voters by speaking Spanish.  He wasn’t the only one.  I don’t think Beto is going anywhere unless he comes up with something brilliant for the next debate. 

Aside from Tulsi Gabbard, I think Andrew Yang is the most genuine person.  He believes in his universal basic income.  He wants the government to pay every American adult $1,000 per month.  The wealth redistribution and the implications of inflation are just a little too direct for many of the leftists to feel comfortable with it.  Most of them want their welfare programs to go through layers of bureaucracy first.

As far as Bernie Sanders, there wasn’t much new there.  We already know his agenda from four years ago.

There wasn’t a lot in the debates about foreign policy.  Bernie was actually pretty good on foreign policy when asked about it. He actually mentioned the crisis in Yemen.

There are a couple of problems though.  He barely spends any time talking about foreign policy unless directly asked. It isn’t on his priority list.

Second, he campaigned for the bloodthirsty Hillary Clinton in 2016.  Anyone who would do this (especially after the DNC rigged the primaries against him) can be counted on to not buck the establishment trend too much.  If Sanders became president, he would quickly be taken over by the establishment war hawks, not all that dissimilar to what has happened to Trump.

The Tulsi Train

By far the most interesting candidate to me (and should be for any libertarian) is Tulsi Gabbard. She is mostly bad on the issues except for foreign policy, which is her signature issue.

She was noticed. Reports are that she was the most searched candidate after the first debate night.  She was easily winning most of the online polls. I saw her over 40% at one point on Drudge Report’s online poll.

She is carving out a niche of her own.  She is becoming the Ron Paul of the Democrats.  She could learn some lessons from the 2008 Ron Paul campaign. She could learn some economics from Ron Paul too, but that is another matter.

Tulsi avoided her first question on gender wage gap, but for the better.  She went straight to foreign policy.  I think she got traction too.

Tulsi is young. She is attractive.  She is pleasant.  She doesn’t sound nagging or annoying.  And while I think her “service” in Iraq was a mistake, it gives her credentials to a certain degree.  It is hard to call her weak.

Tulsi was good at hammering away at foreign policy, but I found her ending statement weak.  I don’t care about clean air and access to healthcare for all.  (Well, I do care about those things, but not anything any of these candidates would do about them.)

She needs to focus continually on her signature issue, which is taking a stance against war and empire.  Whenever she is asked about economic issues, she needs to pull a Ron Paul and immediately tie it to foreign policy.  We can only improve significantly domestically if we dramatically scale back the empire and the many hundreds of billions of dollars per year that go with it.  She did mention a couple of times about the waste of money on the wars, but she can stress this issue even more.

She can also stress the morality of the issue of war.  She mentions the dead Americans from war, but what about the many more dead innocents of the countries that the U.S. government has attacked?

I know we are supposed to appeal to people’s self-interest when it comes to politics.  But most Americans have some sense of morality.  The only way the government can get the American people behind war is by appealing to their morality on false grounds.  They say we need to help the people of another country.  They say it is a humanitarian crisis, so we need to bomb them for their own good.

Ron Paul gained notoriety when he had his exchange with Rudy Giuliani.  Tulsi had a similar moment when she was debating Afghanistan with one of the lesser-known candidates.  It wasn’t quite as good as Ron Paul’s moment, but it was still pretty good.  I think it put her on the map.

I know the establishment is going to smear Tulsi.  They wouldn’t know what to do if it was her versus Trump.  I have no idea if she would be able to stand firm and end the wars if she became president, but at least we are talking about it. She will change the narrative to a certain degree.  The other candidates are going to be forced to contend with her positions at some point.

Bernie Sanders is better than most of them on foreign policy, but we shouldn’t trust him. He will not stand firm.  It isn’t his signature issue.  Tulsi should point this out.  She should point out that Bernie was quick to support Hillary the war hawk in 2016, but I think this can come at a later time.

Conclusions

There has been a lot of “free” stuff proposed.  There is free college, free healthcare, and the wiping out of student debt. Most of these proposals will never have a chance of actually passing Congress, let alone the court of public opinion.

Kamala Harris may be the scariest candidate of all.  She is authoritarian.  She is a war hawk.  She is in favor of much bigger government on the home front.  She is similar to Hillary Clinton, although I don’t know if she is as criminal.

Tulsi Gabbard is easily the most interesting candidate.  Libertarians should support her quest for a more peaceful foreign policy. You can support this aspect without supporting her whole agenda.

At least with Tulsi, she does understand that there is a cost to all of these government programs. She is the only one who has any kind of proposal on how to pay for a greater welfare state.  She wants to bring the troops home and stop spending money on war and empire.

This alone won’t balance the budget, even if nothing new is added.  But it is a lot closer to anything anyone else has.

The one issue where the president can make a major difference is foreign policy. Tulsi should stress this. If she could win the presidency and resist the establishment (which is not easy for many reasons), we could actually see greater peace and a move towards liberty in spite of her other positions.