CNN, knocked for a long, clumsy Republican presidential debate last month, is getting positive reviews for Tuesday night’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas.
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Will CNN approach this debate the same way they approached the Republican debate? “On this stage, you didn’t hear anyone denigrate women, you didn’t hear anyone make racist comments about new American immigrants, you didn’t hear anyone speak ill of another American due to their religious belief”, said the former governor of Maryland, whose earnest campaign gained deserved exposure Tuesday night.
That disparity has naturally carried over into the size of the audience watching the respective parties’ debates.
“They want you to call on them – what you don’t see on camera, a lot of times, are sort of the poker signals, the poker tells that the candidates are giving you, to try to get you to call on them”, he said.
For the time being, the Democratic presidential candidates include former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, Vermont Sen.
No matter how well or poorly candidates perform, experts said if Vice President Joe Biden enters the race, Tuesday’s democratic debate will most likely be forgotten.
Now it’s true that there might have been a few Republicans on their debate stage who aren’t entirely clownish and who, in other circumstances, could show themselves to better advantage. Likewise, her onstage challengers were weak compared to the battle among many strong Republican candidates in their two debates. CNN chief political correspondent Dana Bash and Juan Carlos Lopez of CNN en Espanol will join Cooper in questioning the candidates.
Republican America is a dystopian hellscape in which evil, violent foreigners are trying to kill us in our beds while rapacious jackbooted government thugs try to wrestle our guns from our cold, dead fingers and Planned Parenthood sociopaths are committing mayhem on children and selling the body parts.
Wonkblog has a helpful Venn diagram showing the differences between the Democrats’ and GOP’s debates.
Foreign policy, economic policy, and gun control were all central topics of debate, while health care and reproductive rights were largely absent. The record viewership levels that night were fueled by the participation of Donald Trump. The second GOP debate emphasized split-screen face-offs between candidates. He is much more conservative than the others when it comes to social issues like guns and he has vocalized support for the Keystone Pipeline and opposition to the Iran deal unlike his primary opponents.
An obvious, but undermentioned reality of USA politics at the moment is that making a splash in Democratic politics at the moment doesn’t require grasping for reactionary, unpopular policy positions, while in Republican politics, it does.
Syria was mentioned 28 times in the the GOP debates and 22 times in the Democratic debate.
So, yes, there is other news going on, even if the media echo chamber was debate-centric and the American public’s own grasp of the event a bit tenuous.
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President Obama was mentioned about the same number of times in each debate.
