With urgency rising in their fight to win the nomination to challenge US President Donald Trump in November’s election, the Democrats’ top contenders clashed over experience and electability in a fiery debate on Friday that tested the strength of a new front-runner, former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg, and former US vice president Joe Biden.
Biden, on the offensive throughout the debate, predicted that he would “take a hit” in New Hampshire’s next-up primary election after a weak showing in Iowa, but he also raised questions about the long-term viability of his leading rival, US Senator Bernie Sanders, who identifies as a democratic socialist, and Buttigieg.
“Bernie’s labeled himself, not me, a democratic socialist,” Biden said.
Photo: Reuters
“Turn the page,” the 38-year-old Buttigieg said in a jab at the 77-year-old former vice president. “Now, we have to meet this moment.”
Friday marked the eighth debate in the Democratic Party’s yearlong quest for a presidential nominee. The prime-time affair came just four days after Iowa’s chaotic caucuses and four days before New Hampshire’s primary, with several candidates facing pointed questions about their political survival.
More than their rivals, the debate tested new front-runners, Sanders and Buttigieg, who emerged from Iowa on top, but walked into New Hampshire with liabilities that their Democratic rivals tried to exploit.
With the stakes rising by the day and money rapidly drying up, Biden, and US senators Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar were also fighting to prove to voters and donors alike that a legitimate path to the presidency remained.
Klobuchar was among the underdog candidates who took aim at Buttigieg, criticizing the millennial mayor for saying in a stump speech that the impeachment proceedings against Trump were “exhausting” and that he would rather watch cartoons.
“It is easy to go after Washington. It is much harder to lead and much harder to take those difficult positions,” Klobuchar said.
If elected, Buttigieg would be the youngest-ever US president and he has never served in elected office beyond the mayor’s office.
However, he used experience as a weapon against Biden, a two-term vice president who has spent most of his adult life in Washington.
“I’m interested in the style of the politics we need to put forward to actually finally turn the page,” Buttigieg said.
“The politics of the past I think were not all that bad,” Biden said. “I don’t know what about the past about [former US president] Barack Obama and Joe Biden was so bad.”
Warren avoided any direct criticism of her rivals and repeatedly pivoted to her core anti-corruption message.
As Biden, Sanders and Klobuchar fought about the best way forward on healthcare, Warren did not engage, instead speaking broadly about the need to lower prescription drug costs.
Billionaire activist Tom Steyer and New York entrepreneur Andrew Yang (楊安澤) were fighting to prove they belong in the conversation.
Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg remains a major unknown in the primary math, skipping debates and the first four states’ elections, while flooding the airwaves with hundreds of millions of dollars in ads and picking up significant endorsements.
He is focusing on the big basket of “super Tuesday” primaries on March 3.
Others still participating in the primary are businessman Michael Bennet, US Representative Tulsi Gabbard and former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick.
Additional reporting by staff writer
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
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
RSS