On Thursday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the Daily Wire editor-in-chief talks about the lack of strategy that ultimately derailed the fifth Democratic debate. Video and partial transcript below:
[Wednesday night] was the big Democratic debate! It was gonna be rock ‘em, sock ‘em robots. I predicted many attacks on Elizabeth Warren, I had predicted that Buttigieg would go after Warren, and maybe Klobucher would go after Buttigieg, and everybody would go after — yeah, none of that happened. Instead, they just massaged each other’s shoulders.
This is horrible strategy. If you’re at the bottom of this pack — if you are Cory Booker, for example, or Kamala Harris — if you’re one of these characters who literally has no shot of winning the nomination, then why are you sitting around waiting? What are you waiting for?
If you’re Kamala Harris, and you’re best known for cackling like a hyena, why exactly would you be sitting around waiting for everybody to sort of come around to you? If you’re Cory Booker, why would you just be standing — I mean, I understand Cory Booker is actually running for vice president at this point, he has no shot at the nomination, we all get that. But even if you’re one of the top candidates, why are you not jockeying for position?
It is bewildering to me, particularly because Elizabeth Warren is incredibly vulnerable. I understand why Buttigieg didn’t go after Warren — he’s rising, Warren’s falling. He feels like if I attack Warren, there’s really no upside for me. What I don’t understand is why Warren isn’t attacking Buttigieg, because Buttigieg is taking away her support, not Joe Biden’s support.
Now, maybe she’s perceiving this thing wrong. Maybe Elizabeth Warren thinks that Buttigieg is the one who is grabbing Biden support? But that is not actually true. It’s not actually true. Why is Bernie Sanders not going after Warren? If he wants to regain any sort of mojo here, he has to take back the Elizabeth Warren crowd, and bring it back into his column because he ain’t going nowhere. He’s not running first in Iowa, he’s not running first in New Hampshire — he is running first [in] zero states, zero places. He’s running third to fourth nationally. So what is Bernie Sanders doing?
Instead, they’ll get up there and they just hug it out, man. They just hug it out because, I suppose, they think at this point, it’s better to sort of be in a holding pattern, right? “It’s still early, we still have three months until Iowa.” Maybe they think, “Okay, well, if we just wait this thing out in the field, we’ll sort of shake itself out.” Whatever it was, it was, overall, a very boring debate. I don’t think that anything really changed. But it was, as usual, an ad for Donald Trump.
It was an ad for Donald Trump because the Democrats policies are so radical, they are so wild — and these candidates are incredibly, incredibly off-putting. The more people see of Elizabeth Warren, the less they like her. The more people see of Buttigieg, the more they like him, except when he actually reveals his true face, which is that he’s an extraordinarily radical candidate. He doesn’t like to reveal that too often. He made that mistake early in the campaign. He campaigned as a moderate, started to rise, moved to the Left, and then immediately fell. He’s campaigning as a moderate again and starting to rise again. But whenever people see the real Pete Buttigieg, it’s a problem. The good news for Pete Buttigieg is that [he] is able to mask that really well.
Joe Biden — everybody knows who he is — so there’s a lot of talk today about Joe Biden falling down on the job, Joe Biden having a bad debate. The reason people are saying that Joe Biden had a bad debate is because Joe Biden was basically somnambulant during this entire primary season, right here. He’s basically a sleepwalker. He is comatose, he is not alive — if you shot electricity through his body, perhaps he would move … But that’s all priced in at this point.
Then Bernie Sanders is just Bernie Sanders. He will always be Bernie Sanders. One hundred years from now, Bernie Sanders will be Bernie Sanders, because he always was Bernie Sanders. He’s the high school principal from “Back To The Future” — that dude never had hair. Bernie Sanders was always a crazed old loon bag, even when he was 25.
So did anything change last night? The answer really is no, but the people that helps are Buttigieg and Biden. It does not help Warren, it does not help Sanders.
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