Lincoln-Douglas, that wasn’t.
Bernie Sanders is a man with one speech. Ask him a question about fighting the virus, and he will talk about billionaires and M4A. That’s who he is, and what he does. To criticize him for it at this point is a waste of breath.
Biden had two objectives coming into the debate. The first was to avoid looking like a blithering idiot; here, he succeeded quite nicely, so the impact of the debate on Tuesday’s primaries will be minimal. On the second one, to win over Sanders supporters, he was uneven at best. He missed several obvious opportunities to minimize differences between himself and Bernie, and actually picked fights on a few occasions for no apparently good reason. That was a mistake.
Anyone with Biden’s decades of experience in public life is going to have a record full of nuance. The two-man format offers him enough speaking time to explore the nuances. Instead, for the most part, he is making statements about his evolving positions that make him sound dishonest. He needs to fix that ASAP.
In the meantime, because the candidates did little to heal the chasm between fundis and realos, the real winner was Donald Trump. Fortunately for the Democrats, there is so much attention on the virus at this point that hardly anyone will care.