CBS Democratic Debate: Live Coverage

Interesting thoughts from James Diogenes, one of our live blog commenters tonight:

Sec. Clinton employs a rhetoric of contextualization — she takes issues and rhetorically presents them as more complicated, both to diffuse the yes/no nature of the questions she’s asked and to make her opponents seem unsubtle. When this works, it’s elegant and makes her looks intelligent and mature. When it doesn’t, she looks cagey.

Loudest applause line of the night so far: for Clinton saying that the majority of her political donors are women. “I go after all of Wall Street, not just the big banks,” Clinton said in a heated response to Sanders’s attack on her big-money donors. Sanders says he’s “showing by example” that a campaign can do without big financial donors. O’Malley approached from a different angle of attack, saying the economic advisers that the Democratic leadership uses in the White House should change. And O’Malley then doubles down by saying he agrees with Sanders. But they’re talking about the Glass-Steagall Act. You can read about it here. But how many people even know what the term means?

Harry, circling back to your point about Americans not embracing socialism and socialists, I’m constantly fascinated by the way the term is used and misused politically. Many European nations follow an economic hybrid model of capitalism with a strong element of socialism. I wonder if the way socialism gets used in political conversations make it seem more like communism. This article critiques millennials, but I think when it comes to terminology there’s a cross-generational issue.