Biden did what he had to do in debate

In what’s likely be his final nomination debate, former vice president Joe Biden started strong and ended strong when he talked about the coronavirus pandemic. And he did well enough in the rest of the two-hour event on March 15 with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
Biden had given a solid speech laying out a plan for how the government should be responding to the spread of Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus — for example, he’s urging use of the military to rapidly increase medical capacity — and he seemed ready to implement that plan when he talked about it in the opening segments of the debate. It wasn’t just the specifics. His process-based answers, which often compared what the Barack Obama administration had done during emergencies with what President Donald Trump has been doing, may not have been particularly exciting to listen to, but the truth is that it’s more important for a president to understand how to get things done quickly when necessary than to have ready a specific plan for
a current crisis, given that future situations aren’t easy to predict.
The contrast between Biden and Sanders, who reads every situation as an endorsement for his broad policy preferences, played well for Biden. More importantly, the contrast between both candidates and their thoughtful, coherent and reality-based discussion of the pandemic with the incoherent misinformation from Trump couldn’t have been stronger.
Not to mention that Biden (and Sanders) were able to show compassion and understanding for people going through tough times, which Trump has shown himself to be incapable of doing.
The rest of the debate was a lot less impressive for Biden, although I agree with those who suspect that all anyone will take away from it is his pledge to name a woman as his running mate.
Biden and Sanders spent most of the 85 or so minutes between opening and closing coronavirus segments arguing about long-forgotten positions they took and votes they cast on Social Security, gun control, the Soviet Union and more. Biden inexplicably allowed Sanders to drag him through all this ancient history, much of it sure to be incomprehensible to many voters who had tuned in, instead of simply ignoring the Vermont senator and using his time to lay out his case against Trump.
But most of it won’t matter much. Biden is, by all accounts, likely to win big in Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Ohio, the four states voting this Tuesday, and realistically the competitive portion of this nomination fight ended on Super Tuesday back on March 3, with those results confirmed on March 10.
Debates can matter in the short run during the primaries and caucuses, but they’re much less important in the general election — let alone a primary debate months before November.

—Bloomberg

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics