Democratic White House candidates on Thursday attacked US President Donald Trump, but also clashed sharply with one another during the party debate, where a smaller field allowed lesser-known hopefuls to shine against the front-runners.
One day after Trump’s ignominious impeachment, seven candidates united on Thursday to declare the president must be defeated at next year’s election.
“We need to restore the integrity of the presidency,” said former US vice president and Democratic front-runner Joe Biden, who accused Trump of “dumbing down” the office “beyond what I even thought he would do.”
Photo: AP
US Senator Bernie Sanders, who is second in the standings, blasted Trump as “running the most corrupt administration in the modern history of this country.”
US Senator Elizabeth Warren said the president ignores the poor to do “everything he can for the wealthy and the well-connected.”
However, after calls for greater moral leadership from the White House and crisp back-and-forth about trade policy, healthcare and how to lift more Americans out of poverty, the debate took a more aggressive tone with a series of heated clashes between candidates.
Warren launched her sharpest attacks yet on rival Pete Buttigieg, saying the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has been holding closed-door fundraisers for the wealthy, including at a billionaire-owned “wine cave” in California.
“Your net worth is 100 times mine,” said Buttigieg, whose star has risen substantially in the past two months of campaigning.
“I don’t sell access to my time,” Warren, 70, shot back.
While Warren hit Buttigieg on money in politics, US Senator Amy Klobuchar also sought to kneecap the mayor.
“I did not come here to listen to this argument. I came here to make a case for progress — and I have never even been to a wine cave,” she quipped.
Klobuchar was quick to remind viewers of her Midwestern roots as she called for “returning to sanity” next year.
She also appeared to challenge the accomplishments of Buttigieg, a fellow Midwesterner, labeling him a “local official.”
When Buttigieg suggested there were “bigger fish to fry,” Klobuchar clapped back with a cutting retort: “I don’t think we have bigger fish to fry than picking a president of the United States.”
The final prime-time debate this year featured just seven of the 15 Democrats still in the contest six weeks before the first nomination ballots are cast in Iowa in February.
The showdown marks a significant drop from the 10 candidates in last month’s debate, and the dozen who crowded the stage in October. Cozier quarters allowed for more extended exchanges about policy between participants hoping for their party’s nomination to challenge Trump.
There was extra oxygen for lower-polling candidates, including Klobuchar, billionaire activist Tom Steyer and entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who sought to ease the exasperation many voters have expressed about US politics.
“We have to take every opportunity to present a new, positive vision for the country, a new way forward to help beat him in 2020,” he said of Trump. “Because make no mistake, he’ll be there at the ballot box.”
In a statement calling the Democratic debate “drab” and “pessimistic,” Trump’s reelection campaign said it was “even more clear why they felt they had to impeach President Trump. None of these characters has a chance.”
Biden, popular with blue-collar workers and African Americans, has promised to raise the US’ standing back to the way it was under former US president Barack Obama, rescuing it from the extreme polarization of Trump’s tenure.
The Democratic elder statesman has faced doubts about his health and age — he is 77 — and notably declined to pledge that he would run for a second term if he wins the White House.
“No, I’m not willing to commit one way or another,” he said.
He appeared more feisty and less halting than in previous debates, interrupting moderators to slam the 78-year-old Sanders for a universal healthcare plan that could cost upwards of US$30 trillion over 10 years.
However, near the end of the two-and-a-half-hour event, Biden committed an unforced error by imitating a stammering youth seeking advice on how to overcome a stutter, a problem Biden himself struggled with as a child.
The incident quickly resonated beyond the debate stage, with former White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders mocking Biden on Twitter.
Biden tweeted out damage control, saying: “I’ve worked my whole life to overcome a stutter. And it’s my great honor to mentor kids who have experienced the same.”
Huckabee Sanders apologized for her jibe.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS