Standing six feet apart on an airless and suddenly sparse Democratic debate stage, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders set the tone for a particularly somber and unusual night. …
With COVID-19 spreading ever more rapidly throughout the country, co-hosts CNN and Univision first announced that the previously planned debate would have no audience, before moving the entire enterprise to one of its studios in Washington, D.C. — making this the first debate to do so since the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debates.
From a substantive point of view, watching Biden and Sanders go toe-to-toe on the politics that have divided them throughout the primary — particularly the increasingly relevant issue of health care — made for a more substantive night than the previously crowded Democratic debates could allow. The debate felt more like…well, a, with a more focused back-and-forth rather than the previous debates’ cacophony of one-upmanship.
The fact that there were only two candidates, however, was not the only reason that this debate felt more informative than any other. The severity of the impending COVID-19 crisis stripped the night of the aggressive bells and whistles that CNN and other networks like MSNBC have been throwing at every political bump on the Democratic primary road.
Calderón — asked their questions and then largely got to stay out of the way as the candidates batted their opinions and policies back and forth.
All that, combined with the unusual sobriety with which the cable network approached this debate, made it far easier to focus on the content of what the candidates were saying rather than their ability to cut through the overwhelming noise that cable news tends to bring to most every issue that crosses the anchors’ desks.
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