I went to the New Hampshire Senate Debate in Concord on Tuesday night. Hosted by Chuck Todd – who apparently thinks the only thing New England cares about is baseball – it was a one hour thesis in all that is wrong about politics.
It began with a series of questions about EBOLA, because that is the most important issue to everyone. Except that the economy is the most important issue: AND NO ONE ASKED ABOUT IT! For those keeping score:
Ebola: 1 (same as the number of deaths in the US)
Economy:0
From Ebola we went to the second most important issue: ISIS. So Chuck Todd pressed on the issue, but no one on the stage mentioned one basic fact: ISIS exists because we invaded Iraq. If we had not invaded Iraq we would not exist. This devolved into a series of arguments about the border and how to secure – which were beyond silly
From there we went on to Obamacare. Now the debate between Shaheen and Brown is interesting on this issue for one simple reason not noticed by anyone: BOTH had voted for it. Scott Brown voted for it when he was in Mass (it was called RomneyCare) and Shaheen voted for Obamacare, which is essentially the same thing. For some reason, however, Shaheen, who was absolutely awful in the first half of the debate, never reminded Brown of this.
This took up the first 30 minutes of the debate.
Shaheen was then asked if she approved of Obama’s job performance. She hedged, and the crowd groaned. But this was part of a pattern: in 60 minutes Shaheen did not defend Obama once. EVER. Here are some facts she might have mentioned, which no one knows about:
1. According to the blog CalculatedRisk, Obama is on track to add more private sector jobs in his second term than either Reagan or Clinton.
Read that again. HAS ANY DEMOCRAT MADE THIS SIMPLE ARGUMENT.
2. The biggest foreign policy challenge of Obama’s second term was Iran. Remember Iran? If we had listed to the neo-cons we would have surely bombed it by now. Obama didn’t, but gets absolutely no credit for it. And no Democrat even makes mention of it.
From there we went on to a reasonably good discussion of energy, and Shaheen was good in highlighting her support of renewable energy, and attacked Brown for supporting OIL tax breaks. Brown argued that we need to expand oil production. He noted electric costs were rising in NH (they are) and said that expanding oil production would help lower electric costs.
Except we don’t use oil to generate electricity in the US. We use it for heating oil, but the price on that has declined. Never mind – Brown kept making this argument and no one apparently was going to tell him oil and electricity costs have nothing to do with each other.
This lead to the big moment of the debate: Brown attacked Shaheen for opposing the Nuclear Plant at Seabrook. Shaheen intereupted him and said she didn’t.
This was the big moment: over a nuclear plant that was never opened, and has not been an issue for 20 years.
No mention of the rich and the poor, of the growing inequality in the United States. There was on mention of globalization – but that was in passing.
In short, it was a debate that focused on matters of mostly little important, that ignored the issues people care about, and featured a Democrat who could not say one good word about a sitting Democratic President.
Meh.