Month: February 2020

It’s interesting to see how Ohio is attempting to organize itself in anticipation of a large settlement with the opioid manufacturers and distributors. It’s a good thing to make these companies pay for the destruction they have caused–400,000 deaths so far this century, with Ohio the second hardest-hit state. At the peak in 2010, there were 102.4 opioid prescriptions written for every 100 Ohioans.

But the real point is to do something impactful with the money. The number one need is treatment for those who are addicted or struggling in recovery. Naturally, there are countless municipalities that are gripped with this crisis and have myriad needs. There’s a law enforcement and criminal justice component, and there’s a need to have sensible policies for legitimate pain management. Education is critical, not only for doctors and pharmacists, but for young students, educators, parents, patients and politicians.

It’s not easy to find the right balance for allocating settlement money or to navigate the complicated politics involved.

Hundreds of municipalities in Ohio, along with the state’s governor and attorney general, are nearing an agreement on how to divide any money that might come from a major federal case against opioid manufacturers and distributors, an attempt to ensure fairness in the allocation of a potential settlement as recompense for the ravages of the nation’s opioid epidemic.

Cities and towns have until March 6 to sign onto the agreement, known as “One Ohio.” It would guarantee that the state presents a united front during negotiations, with municipalities directly receiving, in cash, 30 percent of any settlement funds. The state would receive 15 percent, and 55 percent would go toward a new nonprofit foundation that would support research into, and education about, opioids.

My concern with this proposal in that 55 percent going to research and education seems far too high considering the overwhelming need for treatment. It’s extremely expensive to treat an opioid addict. Typical 28-day programs are usually insufficient and therefore inefficient. In any case, most people don’t have the means to afford them, especially when it turns out that the first try didn’t take.  What is needed is a lot of long-term and heavily subsidized care for some of the most unsympathetic people you will ever find. Opioid addiction strips people of their character and their dignity, and puts enormous stress even on the patience of their loves ones. Complete recovery is possible but successful cases usually involve multiple relapses over many years.  If research can improve these results, then that’s worthwhile, but society pays a hefty price for every addict who isn’t in treatment. It increases crimes of theft exponentially, along with associated violence. Overdoses can be so common in some areas that they put stress on ambulance services, fire departments, police, and emergency rooms. And if we care about people, we ought to be committed to saving as many addicts as possible.

The expense explains why municipalities need to see a lot of the settlement money, but the state as a whole needs to development a plan for providing the beds required for long-term treatment. That’s where most of the money should go. Maybe if fewer people become addicts in the first place, through better prescribing practices and more thorough educations about opioids, then the resources can be shifted more to research. But, for now, the problem is primarily that people are already addicted and are going to keep committing crimes and overdosing until they are either imprisoned or die. Many of these people became addicted because they followed the advice of a doctor, but even the recreational drug users deserve our compassion and willingness to help.

The opioid crisis is so deep, I don’t think the settlement money will come close to providing the resources needed for the nation to recover, and that should be people’s greatest concern here. It’s great that Ohio is thinking ahead and trying to be smart, but they’ll probably discover that they don’t have what they need.

Oregon’s cap and trade bill looks really complicated with lots of moving parts, multiple authorities, oodles of exemptions and subsidies, and a strange phase-in regimen. The goal is straightforward, though. They want to make cap how many carbon emissions the state produces and force emitters to bid for allowances. They’re trying to take a leading role in combating climate change, which is already negatively impacting the state.

It’s hard to say how effective the law would be if enacted. It won’t mean much if other states and countries don’t follow along with their own aggressive plans. That’s the risk for all early adopters of serious climate legislation. They could create a competitive disadvantage for themselves without ever reaping a reward. But this is a case where someone has to take the risk and show leadership.

The Oregon Republicans have no intention of being leaders in this area.

Republicans in the Oregon Senate plan to flee the Capitol to stop Democrats’ bill to cap greenhouse gas emissions, after the plan cleared a legislative budget committee Monday morning.

At an 11 a.m. floor session, just one Republican showed up: Sen. Tim Knopp of Bend. Democrats waited on the floor, as sergeants at arms searched Capitol offices to see if they could round up any other Republicans. But they were unable to find any, so Senate President Peter Courtney, D-Salem, adjourned the chamber until Tuesday morning.

This is becoming a regular pattern. The Republicans fled the state to prevent votes on guns and vaccines and now they’re using the tactic for a second time to block climate legislation. As the Associated Press reported last August, the Democrats are already planning to take the issue to the voters:

After two walkouts this year by minority Republican senators in the Oregon Legislature, Democrats said Friday they will ask voters to change quorum rules, allowing the statehouse to convene with only a simple majority of lawmakers present instead of the current two-thirds requirement.

The boycotts by the Republicans prevented the Senate from convening. Democrats dropped proposals on gun control and vaccines and Democratic Gov. Kate Brown ordered the state police to bring the missing lawmakers back during the second walkout.

The Republicans left the state to avoid apprehension, and returned only after Democratic Senate President Peter Courtney announced her party lacked the votes to unilaterally pass a sweeping bill to combat global warming.

Senate Democrats said that Majority Leader Ginny Burdick will introduce a constitutional amendment in the 2020 legislative session to lower quorum requirements. Voters would then decide on the proposed change in the 2020 election.

This is basically what we can expect from Republicans if they’re ever faced with the prospect of congressional action on climate (or guns or health care) in Washington, DC. They will exercise whatever power they have to obstruct to the hilt and deny that the Democrats have the authority or legitimacy to legislate even when they have strong majorities.

This is part of why arguments over policy have to take second place to strategies for overcoming Republican resistance. When you hear progressives talk about seemingly radical steps like eliminating the legislative filibuster or packing the Supreme Court, this is why.

Last week, Jim Geraghty of National Review Online identified four overlooked weaknesses of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. These can be condensed down to:

1. He’d never be able to weather a second major health scare
2. He has no emotional range and struggles with empathy
3. His consistent worldview is a liability when he has to address things that don’t neatly fit within it
4. His support for the working man is selective (see, e.g. fracking industry)

In a subsequent NRO post, Ramesh Ponnuru added a fifth overlooked weakness, that Bernie is soft on crime because he wants to vastly reduce the number of people who are incarcerated.

I’m not very impressed with this list. Even if I grant that Sanders’ health is a potential land mine, that isn’t something too many people are overlooking.  Having a heart attack on the campaign trail tends to drive the point home for the American people. As for items two through four, consider how President Trump stacks up. If these are weaknesses for Sanders, the problem is not unique to him. Finally, if he’s soft on crime, at least he hasn’t been pardoning a slew of famous crooks and scoundrels.

These are not the weaknesses that cause many Democratic officeholders to panic at the prospect of Sanders leading their ticket. Whether they believe Sanders will certainly lose to Trump or not, they think he will do poorly in many of the districts the Democrats used in 2018 to win back control of the House of Representatives. Likewise, they think he will be a liability in many of states holding critical Senate races, like Maine, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona. They don’t think this risk is related to some personality quirk or lack of empathy for energy sector workers. It has to do with how they believe his economic and social policies will play in the suburbs.

I’ve been talking about this subject since a couple of days after the 2016 election and I feel like a broken record. But there is a weakness that is still overlooked that I need to emphasize.

Although Elizabeth Warren might create some of the same vulnerabilities, Sanders is fairly unique among the Democratic candidates in the approach he’s taking to winning an Electoral College majority. Hillary Clinton pursued a suburban strategy and won a sizable popular vote victory. She succeeded in driving up her suburban performance, just not by enough to offset her rural losses. The 2018 midterm strategy for the Dems did not reverse Clinton’s strategy but instead doubled down on it. And it worked largely because President Trump was diligently alienating suburbanites and making the task easy.

What this means is that a lot of newly elected Democrats are dependent on the party keeping to a similar strategy in 2020. A candidate who is happy to trade suburban votes for rural votes could conceivably do better than one who seeks to consolidate and grow the suburban advantage, but that won’t necessarily be good enough to get vulnerable officeholders reelected or for committee chairmen to keep their gavels.

So, the somewhat hidden vulnerability for Sanders is that the party doesn’t feel safe or comfortable with his strategy. When people talk about this, they usually refer to the word “socialism,” but that’s really shorthand for something else. What’s important is that many Democrats will spend the 2020 campaign trying to distance themselves from Sanders in a way they would find unnecessary with the other candidates.

The question isn’t so much whether or not their fears are justified. Since they have these fears, the question is whether or not this lack of unity and message discipline up and down the ticket is going to create an insurmountable weakness for Sanders’ general election campaign.

This is where the difference between Democrats and Republicans really shows up. The GOP establishment was hardly unified behind Trump but they bit their lips and eventually got in line after he was elected. They don’t like to get on the wrong side of their leaders or their base, and will sometimes march into electoral oblivion (see 2006 midterms) rather than seek to distance or distinguish themselves from an unpopular president. Democrats show comparatively little reluctance to fashion themselves as critics of their president. And, unlike Senator Susan Collins of Maine, they tend to follow through. This is why President Bill Clinton couldn’t even get a committee vote on his health care plan when his own party was in control of Congress.

For Sanders, a misshapen coalition that doesn’t jibe with the shape of the Dem’s House Majority will be an obstacle to winning the general election, but it’s not necessarily insurmountable. It will make it harder to win because a divided Democratic Party is weaker than a united one, but there is more than one path to Electoral College victory.

If Sanders were to actually win and become president, he’d discover that this weakness did not go away. While some doubters would get in line, many would not. It’d be different if he brought in dozens of new congressmembers from small town/rural America, but that is almost definitely not going to happen. The Democrats don’t have a lot strong and well-funded people running for those districts, and even if Sanders performs well enough there to carry the states he needs, he’ll probably still be a drag on the ticket in those areas, just as any other Democrat would be.

Of course, Sanders is strong enough that there will be a schism in the party if he is not the nominee, Someone like Elizabeth Warren might be able to minimize this schism but, regardless, the schism would be less likely to persist into an actual administration for the other candidates.

Few people believed that Trump could win traditionally blue Rust Belt states, but he silenced the doubters. Bernie Sanders might silence his doubters, too. I think his platform would do better than people predict in many areas where the Democrats are currently weak. But I also think he’d underperform in the suburbs, and it’s a tradeoff that is never going to win the consent of the party as it is currently constituted.

So, the overlooked weakness for Sanders is that he has no realistic prospect of uniting the party either during or after the election. That doesn’t mean he can’t win, and for people who want to remake the party, it’s not a problem that he’d disrupt it and cause it to change shape.

What does the Maginot Line represent? There is no simple, universal answer to that question. For many, it’s an example that the best-intended plans may go awry. For others, it’s a warning against preparing to fight the last war instead of anticipating the next one.  Many see it as a symbol of a weak resistance that collapses under the slightest pressure. Depending on your perspective, historical knowledge, and emphasis, the Maginot Line can refer to being outsmarted, lacking foresight, or lacking courage and determination. Above all, however it refers to France’s quick defeat in World War Two.

For some, however, it’s not so much that France was beaten as that this had highly catastrophic results. Without the failure of the Maginot Line and the quick surrender of the French, the Germans would not have been able to swiftly conquer Europe, invade Russia, and implement the Final Solution. For these folks, the Maginot Line represents the triumph of evil and the destruction of the Nazi’s long list of undesirable peoples, including millions of Jews.

This last interpretation is perhaps not the most obvious, since if you wanted to talk about the Holocaust or genocide there’s no need to make reference to the French at all. But the fall of France means different things to different people, and there is no right or wrong answer. I mentioned that Maginot Line because it’s common to use it as shorthand for something else, but this subject is in the news for something Chris Matthews of MSNBC said on Saturday after watching Sanders’ landslide victory in Nevada. He didn’t explicitly mention the Maginot Line, but people have picked up the term to characterize his comments.

The Hardball host told viewers that if Sanders became the Democratic nominee, Republicans would release opposition research about “what [Sanders] said in the past about world affairs, how far left he is” that would “kill him” in the general election in November.

“But I think it’s a little late to stop him,” Matthews told viewers.

Then the MSNBC star turned to the history books for an analogy to describe his feelings at watching a series of top Democrats be outpaced by Sanders.

“I was reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940,” said Matthews, “And the general, Reynaud, calls up Churchill and says, ‘It’s over.’ And Churchill says, ‘How can that be? You’ve got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?’ He said, ‘It’s over.'”

“So I had that suppressed feeling,” said Matthews.

It’s hard to know what was in Matthews’ mind, but I believe he was delivering a muddled message. In one sense, he was saying that Sanders had struck quickly in the same kind of blitzkrieg that General Guderian used to stun and defeat the French. But the outcome that most clearly concerned him was not Sanders’ victory but Trump’s.

After all, if we’re sticking strictly to the Nazi analogy, France was eventually liberated. Matthews wasn’t suggesting that the Democratic Establishment win be the winners of the 2020 election, but rather that Trump will be the victor. In either scenario, the Democratic Establishment will be the loser.

Matthews has made other comments about Sanders’ socialism that make it clear that he has an independent antipathy for the senator from Vermont, so this wasn’t a mere slip of the tongue.

In a post-debate show earlier in February, Matthews also began discussing Cold War executions when speaking of Sanders’ embrace of democratic socialism.

“I believe if [Fidel] Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering, okay?” said Matthews.

“So, I have a problem with people who take the other side. I don’t know who Bernie supports over these years,” said Matthews. “I don’t know what he means by socialist.”

Matthews’ distaste for Sanders isn’t in question, but he’s more clearly guilty of comparing him to Stalin than Hitler. It’s unfortunate that he chose an analogy that compared Sanders’ victory in Nevada to the Nazis victory over France, especially because Sanders is Jewish and lost family members in the Holocaust. But that doesn’t seem to be what he was trying to say. He was looking for a way to emphasize that the mainstream Democrats have already been defeated in a quick battle in which they put up only token resistance.

There are some good arguments that Matthews should no longer be a mainstay on MSNBC and supporters of Bernie Sanders have a well-established beef with how Matthews talks about their candidate. I don’t think this event really stands up as a last straw, but his earlier comments about Sanders having people shot in Central Park is a closer call.

Taken in tandem, I think it certainly warrants some executive having a talk with him about how he wants to talk about Sanders and his movement in the future.

As of 6:15pm, there are no official results out of the Nevada caucuses, but a consortium of news organizations has spotters at over a hundred caucus locations, and they’re reporting that Sanders is going to win, and win very big. If the current numbers are close to accurate, Sanders will possibly get north of 40 percent of the vote, and maybe even above fifty. Joe Biden looks like he’ll come in second place and be viable at over 15 percent. Pete Buttigieg is right on the cusp of fifteen percent. Everyone else looks like they’ll be out of luck.

From the look of things, Sanders is benefitting from getting more second choice votes than Biden, so his lead expands once votes for non-viable candidates are reallocated. There is some exit poll data floating around, too, which indicated that Sanders is doing well with minority voters, and also that Biden is doing much worse in the whiter, northern part of the state than in the more diverse southern part.

If these numbers hold, it will be a tremendous victory for Sanders both because of the size of the win and his delegate haul, and because it will demonstrate that he has substantial support with blacks and Latinos.

Assuming that Biden holds onto second place and gets a chunk of delegates, it will be a decent result for him that could be enough to carry him to victory in South Carolina. He certainly cannot afford anything less than this. But it will be an extremely weak second place. His best hope is that it mortally wounds Klobuchar and to some degree Buttigieg and that he can collect some of their support. Elizabeth Warren really needs to hope that the initial numbers are understating her performance, because if she gets shut out of the delegates in fourth place, it’s going to kill the momentum she got out of a very strong debate. It appears that many of her voters were reallocated to Sanders, and if she cannot continue it will be a boon for him.

Based on these factors, it looks like Bloomberg will probably do more to assure Sanders wins the nomination than he will to hurt him. Without Bloomberg, Biden might be able to consolidate some anti-Sanders support, but he isn’t doing well enough to make a strong argument that he’s better positioned to be the alternative to Sanders than Bloomberg. On the other hand, Bloomberg would have preferred Biden to die a violent death at the polls in Nevada, and that doesn’t look like it happened, either.

It’s not over yet, but Sanders looks like he’s close to winning this thing. He has to be the overwhelming favorite now.

 

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Bell Rock in Sedona, Arizona. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit just a few weeks ago.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 6×6 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appears as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

Changes for this week’s cycle include the deletion of that sad little tree out in front. (What was I thinking?) The sky is now complete in a blue that contrasts nicely with the butte. To each side, the distant buttes have been revised. The painting is now done.

The current and final state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have a new painting to show you next week. See you then.

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent explanation of how the Nevada caucuses are supposed to work. After seeing the fiasco in Iowa, I can’t say I’m confident that things will go smoothly in the Silver State. The good news is that the early/absentee vote came in at 75,000, which is higher than in 2016 or 2012. The potentially bad news is that it’s going to be complicated to incorporate the early vote into the tallies at the individual caucuses.

Early voting in Nevada began Feb. 15 and ended on Feb. 18. Early voters were given a list of candidates and asked to rank them in order of preference. They were asked to choose at least three candidates and no more than five. The votes are sent to the home-precinct of the early voter.

Try to picture how this is supposed to work. The caucus-goers show up, listen to some speeches advocating for each candidate and then split up into groups. Maybe Biden supporters gather under one basketball hoop and Sanders supporters gather under the other. Klobuchar folks might stand at half-court, while Buttigieg, Steyer, Warren and undecideds go to the corners. The total numbers in each group are tabulated and then this happens:

What makes this a possible clusterfuck is that all the early votes have to be accurately assigned to the precinct where those voters would have caucused if they hadn’t voted early. Those totals then are added to the groups that are standing around in clusters in the room. They then ascertain the total number of participants (those present plus those who voted early) and then calculate a 15 percent threshold number for candidate viability. If there are 100 participants, then a candidate needs 15 voters to get a delegate.

The people supporting viable candidates are locked in and can’t change their vote, but that doesn’t mean anyone is forcing them to stay where they are rather than ambling over to chat with a friend in a different group. The non-viable supporters then have 15 minutes to convince undecideds or supporters of other non-viable candidates to join their cause. If this successfully bring them up to 15 percent, then they’re viable.

Next, the early vote goes through the ranked choice process. Anyone early voter whose first choice did not reach viability will have their vote cast for their choice. If their second choice is also non-viable, then their vote goes to their third choice.

Only once this is all calculated can the results be determined.

But what happens when someone does this?

Chava Bat-Esha, 70, said she cast her ballot Monday at UNR [University of Nevada-Reno] and checked Sanders as every option.

“Bernie first. Bernie second, Bernie third. Bernie fourth. Bernie fifth,” she said. “I thought I might be for a few and then I started reading more about them and who’s supporting them and it’s big money and against the people.”

I have tried to determine whether or not Chava Bat-Esha’s ballot will be disqualified or not, but I am not sure. Certainly, if Sanders is not viable in her caucus, her vote will not count and will not be reassigned. But it could be that filling in Sanders on the second and third choice rather than simply leaving those options blank or marked as undecided will invalidate her vote even if Sanders is viable.

It’s seems pretty unlikely that this process will go smoothly, and even less likely that we’ll see the final results on election night.

There are too many moving parts and the idea that a perfect vote tally is even possible in these circumstances is based on an unfamiliarity with human nature.

It’s been said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and I think that is the case here. The combination of these three headlines tells a story about how Vladimir Putin is taking over our government that is more compelling than any argument I could make within the scope of a blog post:

Oc course, you can read these articles for yourself here, here, and here. The short version is that the acting director of National Intelligence (DNI), Joseph Maguire, was denied a permanent position and fired after he allowed Shelby Pierson, the “czar” in charge of combatting foreign election interference, to give a briefing to the House Intelligence Committee in which she testified that Russia had developed a preference for Donald Trump and was taking acting measures to assist his reelection.

Trump then put a “Russian hoax” supporter (Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany), temporarily in charge of the Office of National Intelligence and gave him another Russian hoaxer (Kash Patel) as a senior adviser. To cap things off, he announced his intention to nominate a third Russian hoaxer (Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia) for the permanent position as DNI.

This is all taking place in plain sight, but it’s brazenness should not detract from the transparency of the intent here. Trump is making sure the Intelligence Community cannot stop Russia from helping him in his reelection bid, and he’s making sure that the Intelligence Community will not keep Congress apprised of their efforts to do so. He wants the the Intelligence Community to abandon its consensus that Russia interfered in the his first election, and he wants absolute loyalty.

This obviously will benefit Trump, but it also lets Russia off the hook for what they’ve already done while rendering our country helpless to stop what they do in the future. This is active encouragement and even complicity in foreign interference in our current election cycle.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory but a conspiracy fact.

America conducts most of its elections by awarding the winner to the candidate who gets the most votes even if a majority of the people cast ballots for someone else. We’re used to this and people don’t question it as much as they should. It creates all kinds of problems and discourages third party voting. Ranked-choice voting has been adopted in Maine to deal with this, and some states opt for run-off elections if no one reaches a majority.

The Democratic National Convention does not operate by our ordinary rules. To be awarded the nomination, a candidate needs a clear majority of the votes. On the first vote, the delegates will be pledged to a candidate, but thereafter they are free to choose someone else. Also, if there is a second vote, the superdelegates (party and elected officials) get to weigh in.

This is not exactly like ranked choice voting, and it’s not a strict run-off either as no one is eliminated after the first vote. But it offers the opportunity to discover who actually has the most support from the delegates.

Simply having the most votes going into the convention doesn’t tell us much about this since a simple plurality is technically a minority.

On Twitter, I tried to give an example of what I’m talking about. Imagine that you’re the elected sheriff of a small frontier town in the 19th Century and you have finally apprehended the horse thief. The people are joyous but also divided about what kind of punishment should be doled out. You want to please the people and win reelection, so you ask them whether the horse thief should get the death penalty or some lesser punishment. To your surprise, 70 percent of the townsfolk recommend some leniency while 30 percent want him dead.

It would make sense to accept this verdict and begin a debate about a suitable non-lethal sentence, but what if instead you offered four options: hanging, jail, hard labor or a fine?

Now imagine that the same 30 percent opted for the hanging, but the other three options were split at around 23 percent.

Should you hang the bastard because more voters chose that option than any of the others? Do you think this would please the people and make them more likely to reelect you?

The problem was introduced when you didn’t drop the death penalty as an option. This set you up to settle on an unpopular position.

Choosing candidates is not binary like being for or against the death penalty, but neither does it confer any natural credibility to have the most votes among many options if most of the people have voted for someone or something else.

We tend to think it makes sense that the person with the most votes should win because that’s how we ordinarily operate, but it’s not uncommon for someone to lose an election in our country because a third party candidate cannibalized their votes. A Republican who wins a blue district because the Green Party candidate pulled 10 percent of the vote is not in a better position to win a one-on-one race. If they won according to the rules, we accept that, but the Democratic National Convention does not operate by those rules.

A Democrat who isn’t even supported by a majority of their own party is not necessarily going to be a better position than other candidates to beat Donald Trump. One can argue that denying the winner of a plurality the nomination would be divisive and cost the alternative the party unity needed to win, but you can just as easily argue that nominating someone who cannot command a majority within the party will have the exact same problem.

At the Nevada debate on Wednesday, every candidate except Bernie Sanders refused to commit to supporting a plurality winner. Collectively, they have won over 70% of the votes so far in Iowa and New Hampshire, but only Buttigieg has accumulated more delegates than Sanders. As I said above, this isn’t a binary pro- or anti-Sanders vote. It wouldn’t be fair to say that 70% oppose Sanders or that anyone else has more support than he does. To determine that, you need to get down to second choices.

Imagine asking a Buttigieg voter who they prefer if Buttigieg isn’t the candidate, and then when they tell you ‘Klobuchar,’ you respond by saying you can’t pick her because Sanders got more votes. That would’t be a fair way of measuring voter sentiment. But that’s what a lot of people think needs to happen if no one gets a majority before the convention.

According to the rules, the people get to choose the nominee rather than party bosses, but if the people don’t produce a majority winner, then it is up to the delegates to agree on someone. The best way for them to do that is to express their true preference rather than defer to the person with the most votes. We wouldn’t want to see a hanging just because the delegates couldn’t agree on a lesser punishment and we shouldn’t believe that kind of process will please the townsfolk and find the best candidate to beat Trump.

John Podhoretz of the New York Post thought Wednesday’s Democratic caucus debate in Nevada was the best debate in human history. It’s a sign of something that I’m inclined to agree with him, even if it’s probably for different reasons.

I think Podhoretz just enjoyed watching the Democrats fight, especially because they were landing haymakers against each other. For him, it’s the guilty pleasure of an anti-Trump conservative. I agree that the entertainment value was sky high, but the worth I got out of it was more cathartic.

It really exposed my feelings about these candidates, all of whom displease or disappoint me to a degree I hadn’t fully understood until I saw how much I enjoyed watching them be pummeled.

But it was deeper than that. As much as I enjoyed watching Michael Bloomberg get carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey or Sanders take incoming over the behavior of his supporters and staff, and as satisfying as it was for Buttigieg and Klobuchar to drop their Mr. and Mrs. Nice act and let their raw ambition shine, what I really enjoyed was seeing the candidates let their emotions and values drive their performance.

Like most everyone else, I’ve grown tired of watching Sanders deliver the same old lines in debate after debate, but having Bloomberg beside him as the personification of everything he loathes really brought out a fresh passion in him and let us see how deeply he believes in what he’s saying. Bloomberg’s presence did much the same thing for Warren, who unleashed every bit of bottled up outrage she had in her reservoir. And she spared no one on the stage. Podhoretz compared her performance to Machine Gun Kelly, and that’s pretty accurate. However, her aim was excellent.

She brought an immediate energy to the stage which rubbed off on Joe Biden. He appeared fully awake for this debate for the the first time, and was much more assertive and confident in making a case for himself. Having Bloomberg as a foil seemed to finally give him the focus to explain his candidacy’s rationale with convincing passion.

The constant bloodletting on the stage was ill-suited for Buttigieg who has been making progress by sounding nice and reasonable compared to his opponents. But he evidently blames Klobuchar’s surge in New Hampshire for denying him a victory there and he went after her without mercy. At one point, she turned to him and asked, “Are you mocking me here, Pete?” He most certainly was, and it was more revealing than another night of the scripted platitudes he usually provides.

Klobuchar was thrown badly off script, and the result was that people got a much clearer picture of what she’s like in real life. Her temper flared as she struggled to explain why she couldn’t name the president of Mexico, which isn’t surprising given what her staff has said about her insecurities.

Ms. Klobuchar’s exasperation often appeared connected to two factors: an abiding fear of being embarrassed in front of colleagues or in the press and the conviction that she works harder than her staff.

Having her intelligence and base of knowledge mocked on national television caused her to drop her mask, and it basically killed the credibility of her scripted closing argument about more uniting the Democrats than dividing them.

A lot of the commentariat was somewhere between disconcerted and horrified by the overall incivility of the debate, but I thought it was tremendously revealing. More than any debate I can remember watching, we got to see behind all the posturing and strategizing that usually makes debates nothing more than performative art. It takes a monumental amount of ambition and self-conceit to think you should be president and it’s a good thing to see people drop the nice act and bring out the knives in an effort to win.  But it was more than just seeing the candidates act like they really care about their campaigns. When they let their emotions rule them for a change, they gave us a better picture of the kind of issues and values that drive them.

Telling politicians to “just be yourself” is rarely the best advice, and several of the candidates on the stage Wednesday night did themselves no favors. But the voters got more than they bargained for, and they’re better equipped to make a decision on whom they want to support.

Isn’t that best outcome from a presidential debate?