Biden and Sanders Spar on Health Care as Virus Dominates Debate

In their first one-on-one encounter of the primary race, Sanders, a democratic socialist, demanded sweeping economic reform and the creation of a single-payer health care system to address crises like the virus. Biden said he would call up the military to help and enact a “multi-multi-billion dollar program” of disease containment and economic rescue, and said that there were more issues at hand that could not wait on reinventing the health care system.

Biden also used the debate to explicitly pledge to name a woman as his running mate, a vow that prompted Sanders to say he would “in all likelihood” do the same.

The specter of the disease pervaded their encounter from their first moments onstage: Biden and Sanders declined to shake hands at the start and stood 6 feet apart from each other at a television studio in Washington, following the guidelines for social distancing prescribed by public health authorities. In deference to the same regulations, the debate took place without a live audience.

Biden and Sanders approached each other at first with caution, splitting over matters of policy but largely declining to go on the attack in sharp terms, before clashing in a feistier manner as the event wore on. Their early restraint was notable, because the debate was their first encounter since Biden reclaimed his once-wobbly status as the Democratic front-runner and Sanders lost the surging momentum he captured in the race for a time last month.

Where the two men agreed was in deploring President Donald Trump’s approach to the coronavirus, and demanding a more far-reaching government strategy to contain the disease and patch up the economic wreckage it is causing. Biden, the former vice president, likened the contagion to a war, arguing that every resource of the government should be mobilized to limit short-term damage, while Sanders said that countering it would require a more drastic overhaul of economic and health care systems.

“This is like we are being attacked from abroad,” Biden said. “This is something that is of great consequence. This is like a war.”

Sanders, Vermont’s junior senator, called the coronavirus crisis an “unprecedented moment in American history,” and said it drew attention to the fact that the country lacked “a system that is prepared to provide health care for all people.” He held up the crisis as an illustration of what he called “the dysfunctionality” of America’s patchwork of public and private health care health care plans.

In an early barb directed at Biden, Sanders said it would take a direct confrontation with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries to remedy the situation, including by enacting his proposal for the “Medicare for All”-style system that he has championed.

“Do we have the guts to take on the health care industry, some of which is funding the vice president’s campaign?” Sanders asked rhetorically.

But Biden pushed back aggressively on the notion that Sanders’ signature proposal could mitigate the virus, invoking Europe’s hardest-hit country.

“With all due respect to Medicare for All, you have a single-payer system now in Italy,” he said, arguing that single-payer “would not solve the problem.”

But beyond their familiar disagreements on health care, Sanders leveled a larger critique of Biden’s approach to leadership, accusing him of compromising too readily with Republicans and corporate interests, and challenging the former vice president over decades’ worth of votes on abortion, gay rights, foreign wars, bankruptcy regulation and retirement-security programs.

At times, the debate became a kind of tense colloquy between longtime colleagues, as Sanders prodded Biden to account for his past positions.

In the most heated moments, the two candidates scolded each other by name — interjecting “Joe!” and “Bernie!” — and showed visible exasperation. Biden laughed at one of Sanders’ rebukes and muttered “Give me a break” when Sanders urged him to disavow a super PAC supporting his campaign.

“I won’t give you a break on this one, Joe,” Sanders said. “You’ve condemned super PACs. You’ve got a super PAC. It’s running negative ads.”

Indeed, Sanders repeatedly forced Biden onto the defensive, leading the former vice president to play down or misstate portions of his own record. Challenged by Sanders for his role championing bankruptcy reform in the early 2000s, Biden said he did not help write the legislation and “made it clear to the industry that I did not like the bill” — though Biden was among its most vocal Democratic supporters.

Pressed by Sanders about his past comments in the Senate suggesting it could be necessary to rein in Social Security and other popular entitlement programs, Biden gave a halting series of answers that prompted Sanders to urge him to “be straight with the American people.”

“Joe, you just contradicted yourself,” Sanders jumped in. “One minute you say, ‘I was not on the floor.’ The next minute you say, ‘Well, yes, there was a reason why I was worried about the deficit.’”

Biden confronted Sanders, too, with some of his own past votes, including his opposition to some gun-control legislation.

But even as they feuded, the candidates stopped well short of the kind of scorched-earth attacks that have characterized the climactic debates in past nomination fights, including both the Democratic and Republican primary campaigns in 2016.

After one extended attack on him, Biden good-naturedly noted that he had tried to give Sanders “credit for some things” but that he was “making it harder for me,” prompting the Vermont senator to smile. Both candidates said they would support and campaign for the other in the general election.

“If I lose this thing, Joe wins,” Sanders. said. “Joe, I’ll be there for you.”

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And Biden was not shy about defending other elements of his record from his liberal rival: When Sanders dismissed the 2008 bailout of the financial sector as a gift to Wall Street executives, Biden chided him and argued that if the banks had not been stabilized the country would have plunged into “a great depression.”

“All those people Bernie said he cares about would have been in deep trouble,” Biden said.

Both candidates highlighted their own new habits: online gatherings instead of in-person campaign rallies, and no more handshaking — and lots of handwashing. “I’m using a lot of soap and hand sanitizers,” Sanders said. Added Biden, “I wash my hands God knows how many times a day with hot water and soap.”

The forum on Sunday was originally set to be held in Phoenix, before a live audience. But in a series of incremental announcements over the past week, CNN and the Democratic National Committee declared that there would be no live audience; that the debate would be moved to Washington, D.C.; and that one of the planned moderators, Jorge Ramos, would be replaced because he might have been exposed to the coronavirus.

The unusual circumstances reflected a larger freeze in the presidential campaign: Biden and Sanders have all but halted public campaign activity since last week’s primaries.

Both candidates are in their late 70s and could face the risk of contracting the virus themselves from prolonged exposure to large numbers of voters. Aides to Biden, 77, and Sanders, 78, have said that neither man has been tested for the coronavirus or shown any symptoms of the disease.

Amid the slowdown in campaigning, Biden and Sanders have been trying to match their core themes to the moment of crisis. There is now a general view among all of the political campaigns — including Trump’s — that the coronavirus could well redraw the existing contours of the presidential race. The crisis might undermine Trump’s plans to run on promises of continued prosperity and instead focus public attention above all on the difficult process of managing a contagion and rebuilding a shaken economy.

Both Democrats have sought to convey qualities of leadership and gravitas that match the moment. In Wilmington, Delaware, on Thursday, Biden gave sober remarks before a wall of flags, outlining his recommendations for addressing the coronavirus and arguing that the outbreak was a study in the importance of global cooperation and aggressive administrative action at the federal level.

Speaking several times from his home base in Burlington, Vermont, Sanders cast the crisis as an indictment of the American health care system and called for a government response “on the scale of a major war.” He recommended sweeping new policies to suspend evictions and to guarantee paid leave for workers.

And in a sign of his urgent need to break through, Sanders has even taken inspiration from the fireside radio addresses of his political hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt; on Saturday, Sanders hosted a live stream from his home, speaking and taking questions from supporters in front of a roaring fire.

If the slowdown in campaigning has affected both candidates, it has come at a particularly inopportune moment for Sanders, who has been losing momentum for weeks and has long relied on large-scale public events to energize voters and to drive his message. As a result, Sanders aides viewed the debate as a unique opportunity to take on Biden and to prevent him from achieving an unbreakable grip on the nomination.

But the spread of the coronavirus has also seemingly strengthened Biden in other ways, creating a mood of emergency that has played to his political strengths. A poll published last week by CNN found that Democratic voters trusted Biden more than Sanders to handle a crisis by a wide margin. And Sanders may have difficulty persuading new voters to embrace his vision of political revolution when their lives are already being upended by a pandemic.

Several polls in the past week have found Biden leading Sanders by more than 20 percentage points overall among Democratic voters, and ahead of Trump in the general election by a smaller but still sizable margin.

Biden won in four of six states on Tuesday and leads in a fifth, Washington state, where votes are still being counted; Sanders captured only the North Dakota caucuses. Most significant, Biden routed Sanders in Michigan, carrying every county and claiming the largest delegate prize of the day by nearly 17 percentage points.

While some delegates have yet to be awarded, Biden’s success last week helped him push his delegate advantage to over 150 — a margin that could be impossible for Sanders to overcome in the Democrats’ proportional system if he does not start winning states in landslide fashion.

That is highly unlikely to happen in this Tuesday’s contests. Biden is poised to overwhelm Sanders in Florida, the largest state of the four that are voting, because of the demographic makeup of the primary electorate there: suburban whites, African-Americans and immigrants from Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, who view socialism as politically toxic.

The former vice president also appears strong in Illinois and Ohio, which are politically and culturally similar to nearby Michigan. The only state where Sanders could prove competitive is Arizona — he has performed well with Hispanic voters in the West — but even there Biden enjoys a sizable advantage in the polls.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .