Frank Bruni loved Warren being "cunning" & "evasive" last night. "Slipperiness gets you the prize."

[highplainsdem]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/13/opinion/last-night-democratic-debate.html

She showed how canny she can be. How cunning.

Criticism came her way, and she brushed it off like so much lint.

Perhaps most crucially, she was evasive, which isn’t a noble quality but is as essential as any other when you’re running for office. Idealism puts you in play. Slipperiness gets you the prize.

-snip-

But I was most struck by how she refused to say whether Medicare for All would require a middle-class tax increase. One of the debate’s moderators, George Stephanopoulos, asked her, and then Biden pressed her, but she never grew flustered and never succumbed, instead stressing over and over that in terms of people’s reduced health care costs, they’d be ahead of the game.

You could call that deceptive. But you could also call it disciplined. I shook my head as I watched it, but I also tipped my hat. She’ll be in this thing until the end.

I saw a number of tweets last night commenting on Warren's evasiveness.

This is the first praise of her evasiveness I've run across.

[DrToast]

1. Taxes are how we fund importrant government programs

The Republican narrative that "taxes are evil!" will never change if we don't address it head on. Being evasive may help in the short term, but it doesn't help in the long run.

[highplainsdem]

2. Agree completely.

[LincolnRossiter]

5. Agree. Taxes are just one of the prices we pay to live in a (semi) civilized society.

Like most things in life it's a balancing act. We want certain public services, and that requires us to give up some of our income to the government.

[Demsrule86]

20. Yes, but politicians who run on raising taxes lose...and badly.

[LincolnRossiter]

3. The MSM has its favorites. We know it. They know it. May as well cope.

I was a big time Obama supporter (over Hillary) in 2008, but had to acknowledge that he was clearly the media's favorite in that showdown. Just as Hillary was in 2016 over Bernie.

It shouldn't be, but it is what it is.

[betsuni]

11. According to Harvard's Shorenstein Center, Sanders had the most favorable media coverage of any

of the candidates, Democratic or Republican. Hillary had by far the most negative coverage of any candidate.

http://shorensteincenter.org/pre-primary-news-coverage-2016-trump-clinton-sanders

[LincolnRossiter]

14. Maybe my memory fails to serve me. I remember all the pissing and moaning about "emails," but don't

seem to recall the media really going after her until the general election.

[BeyondGeography]

4. Best thing he has written in a while

[Ninga]

6. For right now, she loses the debate the very minute she tries to explain the math OR allows

a debate moderator to try and corner her.

Private insurance premiums go away. Taxes go up at a rate MUCH LESS than yearly premiums.
Net gain for taxpayers.

[highplainsdem]

9. You're saying she loses the debate when she actually answers the question. IMO her evasiveness isn't

a winning strategy. People who are already her supporters think it's smart. But it's hard to win someone over by showing them how evasive you can be.

Sanders is willing to admit his plans will make middle-class taxes go up.

In many ways I think Warren is a superior messenger for many of the same messages, but I don't find her evasiveness admirable.

Bruni called her slippery here.

Howard Fineman called her "slick."

Link to tweet

It might be good debating technique, but I don't believe most voters value slipperiness when important questions are asked.

[Demsrule86]

12. So she knows MFA is a loser but still runs on it...evasion only works for so long.

[LincolnRossiter]

16. Exactly this.

NT

[Blue_true]

36. Canada's per person health care cost are less than half ours.

England's costs are less than half ours. Everyone in Canada and England has basic healthcare coverage (deals with all except cosmetic healthcare). Canada has around 30 million people, England (et Great Britain has over 200 million, we have 330 million.

If we lower our healthcare costs per person to just 75% of what they are now, the savings annually run into hundreds of billions of dollars. MFA is not "a loser", it is a tradeoff on how people pay for healthcare, pay more in taxes, but save several hundred billion dollars collectively, money that people can either spend or save.

[crazytown]

17. Politics 101: Don't feed the GOP soundbites.

[highplainsdem]

21. You think voters can't see through her evasiveness? It really works against the image she's trying

to project of being plainspoken and honest and authentic.

Sanders outdoes her on this particular point.

And that might be part of why she really isn't pulling away from him yet in their fight for second place, even though she's a better messenger in many ways.

[crazytown]

25. Do you remember when Mondale said this?

[highplainsdem]

29. Do you think anyone believes Warren won't raise taxes?

[crazytown]

31. You didn't answer my question.

[highplainsdem]

32. Everyone remembers it. It isn't relevant, because no one believes for a second that Warren won't

raise taxes.

[crazytown]

33. They remember it because it is a sound bite.

It's why Castro was so outrageously irresponsible last night. Reagan's presidency was the beginning of the sound bite era, It began with lessons like this -

[highplainsdem]

34. Clips of journalists pointing out she dodged the question could be very effective, too.

Especially now that digital ads can be longer and still much cheaper than old TV ads.

[Demsrule86]

22. Refusing to answer is a 'yes' in many people's mind...replace Mondale with Warren and you got a 2020

add...and the results will be equally disasterous for our party and our country. Warren is running on unpopular issues and does not have AA support she should not be the nominee...I support her only in a general...not a primary.

[highplainsdem]

30. Exactly. The evasiveness translates as, "Yes, your taxes will go up, but I won't say so."

[LincolnRossiter]

15. That's always the selling point. I'd have to see the math on that.

Private insurance premiums go away. Taxes go up at a rate MUCH LESS than yearly premiums.
Net gain for taxpayers.

[highplainsdem]

24. Some problems with the math could be a large part of why she's now admitting she won't be releasing

her own health care plan.

[DrFunkenstein]

7. Democrats Historically Suck at Framing An Issue - They Take The Bait

You don't have to be George Lakoff to see how, for example, Senator Biden accepted George Bush's framing of the War on Terror.

Warren impressively took a question of light bulbs at the town hall and simply rejected that framing of the issue. That's the sort of presence of mind and message discipline that we need for the entire Party.

[TreasonousBastard]

8. Well, there's evasiveness as in bullshitter, and evasiveness as in not wanting to...

be painted into a corner. And there's a lot of overlap between the two.

One of NYC's most popular Mayors, Ed Koch, was a master of the "dazzle 'em with bullshit" theory of governing. NY, everyone should know by now, is one of the most ungovernable places on the planet. Every time you wake up in the morning you are hit with unsolvable problems and warring factions.

Think Afghanistan without the artillery pieces.

Anyway, whenever a problem arose, he could talk for half an hour and everyone thought he agreed with them, but no one really knew what he said. And it worked! Yeah, sometimes it didn't and we had a riot or two, but most of the time he calmed things down.

And he loved it! He was always having events at City Hall. Back in those days City Hall park was open and a lot of us used to grab a hero on Fulton St and sit on the grass in the park. There were a number of joints lit and the cops knew it was better to avoid the park unless called.

So, we sat there hoping someone would get the keys to the city that day.

[Fiendish Thingy]

10. A bold leader who crafts her own narrative, not responding to the MSM's narrative

Bruni can call it evasive, but I call it leadership. Warren will need to address this question concretely, but on her own terms, not the media's.

[Demsrule86]

13. She is not selling it...Sanders is more honest about it...there will be tax increases...and she can

only evade so long...we will lose the general if she is the nominee...I would vote for her and work for her of course...but our chances are slim.

[Fiendish Thingy]

23. I think Biden's cognitive decline is more of a liability in the general than Warren's "evasiveness"

She can create her own response on her own terms to the tax issue, Biden on the other hand...

[BlueMTexpat]

18. After the snark, Bruni went on to praise many of

her answers.

From the same link:

...
I’ll come back to that last observation, but first: Afghanistan. Warren’s reputation isn’t staked on foreign-policy expertise. She focuses more on domestic issues than on international ones.

But when she was asked whether she would pull remaining American troops out of Afghanistan no matter the state of the conflict there, she emphatically said yes then gave an explanation that was its own miniature master class in political communication.
...
... Performance-wise, she’s pulling away from Sanders. He shouts and then shouts louder. She’s hardly quiet, but she has grown better and better at layering in personal anecdotes and dabs of humor, which he has never been any good at.

He still favors the word “oligarchic,” as if saying it for the zillionth time will finally make it roll off the tongue. She instead talks of “multinational corporations” and their corrupt chief executives, using more concrete images and language and doing, from a different end of the political spectrum, what Trump did with such effectiveness: identifying a class of villains on whom all of the country’s problems can be blamed.
...

Please name one politician who is NEVER evasive.

[highplainsdem]

27. He doesn't mean it as snark. He thinks her being evasive and slippery is admirable and will help

her win.

[blm]

35. She was clear to me saying overall costs will go down. I'll gladly trade cost

Of my health insurance, which is $7200 a year, for a $1000 increase cost in my taxes.


What part of overall costs will go down has become a mystery to people here?

Sounds like faked outrage and concern to me.

[customerserviceguy]

19. I was expecting her

to go after Joe Biden on economic issues (bankruptcy, etc.) but I guess she's saving that for later debates when she can get a lot more talk time in. She knows that she's most likely to rise, so there's no sense in trying to have the final showdown this early.

[Demsrule86]

26. People still get bankruptcies quite easily in large part because of stuff put there by Biden and

other Democrats...good luck with that...can't think of a better way to lower her numbers...so I am all for it. She should not be our nominee IMHO. She has my support in a general of course.

[BlueMississippi]

28. She acts like being a straight shooter when she is anything but

The only straight shooters in this campaign are Biden and Beto.