Charles Lipson

Thursday night’s debate was far calmer and more substantive than the street brawl that preceded it. If we score it like a boxing match, it was pretty close. Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden landed punches. Neither had to be carried out on a stretcher. But that’s the wrong way to look at it. It matters, obviously, that neither candidate won a decisive victory and that Trump needed one more because he’s trailing, according to polls. But the debate helped Trump in another way. Biden said things he will regret. Time and again, he made false or misleading claims and politically-questionable promises. Three stand out: 'super predators’, fracking and family corruption.

The vice presidential debate was a predictable clash between two solid professionals, each with plenty of debate experience. Both said what they came to say, and not one jot more. Both evaded several hard questions, such as how they would handle changes in abortion laws, if the Supreme Court rules force some changes. 'I'm glad you asked about baseball, Susan, because the American people love sports. And the sport they really love is football. That's what's on their mind now.' That's how they answered questions. If they had a prepared answer about football, that's the answer they gave. That meant Pence never explained how a second Trump term would handle pre-existing medical conditions and Harris never renounced a court-packing scheme.

Does Nancy Pelosi’s unfortunate trip to a hair salon have any news value? Or is it much a hairdo about nothing? Compared to the big stories of the day, it hardly matters. The country faces violent disorder, we’re unsure who will become our next president and millions of people are trying to get back to work and school. To paraphrase Humphrey Bogart, 'It doesn't take much to see that the problems of one person getting a shampoo and blow-out don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.' But even in this crazy world, Pelosi’s misstep deserves some attention because it so perfectly encapsulates a larger, more troubling problem. Insiders like Pelosi are allowed to play by a different set of rules than the rest of us.

Some conflicts begin with clear aims but morph into endless battles, the original motives forgotten. The timeless metaphor for self-sustaining battles is Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the inheritance case at the heart of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. ‘Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on,’ he wrote. ‘This scarecrow of a suit has, over the course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means... Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it.’ Now we have Portland v. Public Order. What Jarndyce was for the law, Portland is for the lawless. For over two months, young demonstrators have gathered each night in Oregon’s largest city.

Joe Biden’s speech was effective in many ways and sure to please his supporters. But anyone who expected him to say something substantive about his policies left empty-handed. He did little more than spin gauzy pictures of a rosy future.First, the good news for Biden supporters. He looked strong, never stumbled, and delivered the speech with remarkable empathy, energy, and modulated tones. His performance showed no traces of the confusion he has shown occasionally or the cognitive decline he has been charged with. He was at his best.Biden also made the best of his strongest quality: he’s a likable guy, whose tragedies have made him deeply sympathetic to others facing their own difficulties. He’s not faking that, and it shows.

In an opinion column for the New York Times, Thomas Friedman proposes that Joe Biden debate Donald Trump only if the President meets two conditions. Trump must release his tax returns and agree to a non-partisan panel of fact-checkers. The fact-checkers, he says, should point out the debaters’ errors in real time and conclude the event by summarizing their findings. Among really bad ideas, this one is a prize-winner. Let us count the reasons why. Trump’s failure to release his tax returns is a legitimate issue to debate, not a precondition for one. Biden is free to raise it on the campaign trail and debate stage, just as Hillary Clinton did. Remember, the voters have already dealt with this issue once.

Rod Rosenstein’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee was quiet, calm, almost bemused. But the tale he told was devastating — to the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Mueller investigation. It destroyed three years of media narrative about ‘Trump-Russia’ collusion. It’s obvious now why Senate Democrats want to kill all future hearings on the topic. They lack the votes to do it, but it’s the thought that counts. Testifying under oath, Rosenstein laid out a series of fundamental problems plaguing the entire collusion investigation. Actually, he did even more.

Minnesota Nice Wasn’t Enough. Neither were Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s center-left positions and bland presentations. And so, today, she left the race for president. Why?The immediate reason is that her chances of winning anything on Super Tuesday were grim. The only exception was her home state, and it was far from certain. Klobuchar’s failures at the ballot box meant she had no plausible path forward. Her donors would stop giving and her backers would begin blaming her (and other also-rans) for blocking Joe Biden, who they now see as the only center-left candidate with a shot at the nomination. Biden’s huge victory in South Carolina and Bloomberg’s disastrous debates cemented that position. Party insiders are desperate for an alternative to Bernie Sanders.

1) Joe Biden lives to fight another day, bloopers, gaffes, and all. But on Tuesday he needs to win a major state or finish a strong second to seize the spot as Bernie Sanders’s chief competitor.Biden’s poor showing in Iowa and New Hampshire meant the South Carolina primary was his last stand. His recent polling showed his lead was small and decreasing. So the stakes were high and the situation dire. But the former VP was right to go all-in for South Carolina, which he always called his firewall. His loyalty to President Obama and his endorsement by Rep. James Clyburn were crucial in a state with a large African American population.

After her paltry showing in New Hampshire, Elizabeth Warren will soon be gone, a victim of her faux personality, her failure at identity politics, her badgering, eat-your-spinach style, and her crucial mistake of telling voters how much her healthcare program will actually cost. Bernie Sanders followed Marx’s pattern: explain how dreadful the current situation is, paint a glorious, gauzy picture of the idealized future, and never explain how it will work in practice or how we can get there without a bloodbath. That’s Bernie’s approach. He steadfastly refuses to say what his gigantic federal programs will cost. The media, initially eager to boost any Democrat against Trump, hasn’t really pressed him on that omission, with the exception of CBS’s Norah O’Donnell. Yet.

The Monday night caucuses were the biggest moment in four years for Iowa Democratic party. They screwed it up beyond belief. They had one task: to produce timely, accurate, and reliable vote totals, and they failed completely. TV anchors sat around filling time, waiting for Godot to show up with election returns. None appeared. The candidates themselves began flying off to New Hampshire for next week’s primary. It was a fiasco, a huge embarrassment not only for state officials but for the national party. It denied the winners their big moment before the TV cameras on election night — and the fundraising bonus that goes with it. It left the losers wondering if they’ve been robbed.