I Can't Hear You, There's a Debate Going On

The Democratic Party had a unified message in its 10th debate of the 2020 primary, and that message was: [LOUD CROSSTALK].

Sorry if you couldn’t quite make that out! But the seven candidates in Charleston, South Carolina, had a lot they wanted to say to the voters. And to one another. And more specifically, over one another.

Blame the calendar, in part. It was the last chance, before the South Carolina primary and the delegate bonanza of Super Tuesday, to slow Sen. Bernie Sanders’ momentum or plow past Michael Bloomberg’s avalanche of cash. The field spent most of the night yelling and waving like shipwreck survivors trying to flag a rescue helicopter.

It probably got voters’ attention, in the same way that it gets your attention when several car alarms go off on your block at once. But it may not have helped anyone distinguish the candidates, except by volume.

A debate does not lose control of itself. It’s a team effort, and the dubious MVPs of this one were the CBS moderators, led by Norah O’Donnell and Gayle King, who got flat-out mugged.

O’Donnell and King can be skilled at one-on-one interviews, but there’s a special art to moderating. You can ruin a debate just as well by overpolicing it, and sometimes it’s best to let the arguments flow. The Nevada debate last week was fiery but engaging, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren flayed Bloomberg in his first debate and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar exchanged sharp, personal barbs.

But when a fight turns into a stampede, moderators need to make the debate coherent for the audience or guide it with productive questions. The CBS crew wasn’t equipped to do either.

Several of their early questions amounted to: That thing you said at the last debate, would you say it again? The coronavirus outbreak — a perfect opportunity to ask candidates how they’d govern in a crisis differently from the current administration — didn’t come up as a question until the second hour. They closed by asking the candidates for a personal motto and the biggest misconception about them, aka, “Please root through your stump speech for an inspirational yearbook nugget.”

And the moderators’ attempts to finally keep speakers to the time limit came off as defeated. “I know it goes fast, but 1:15 is a really long time,” King said.

When there is no law, each candidate makes their own. Buttigieg and Sanders spent much of the night sniping over each other like two stereos tuned to different talk-radio stations. Warren reprised her surgical strikes on Bloomberg, adding a few on Sanders.

Klobuchar found herself sandwiched in a shouting contest between former Vice President Joe Biden and the businessman Tom Steyer. And Biden made his battle for airtime into a peeved running joke. “Why am I stopping? No one else stops,” he said, in what may have been the slogan of the night.

Bloomberg, meanwhile, was out to recover from his shaky debut in Nevada. Before last week, he had been the primary’s equivalent of Ozymandias from HBO’s “Watchmen”: the powerful billionaire occupying a separate storyline, which you had to take on faith would intersect with the main plot eventually.

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The former mayor seemed better prepared but still irritable. And he deployed some of his made-to-order jokes awkwardly, like a self-deprecating reference to his Nevada-debate faceplant (“after I did such a good job in beating them last week … ”) that might have landed if he’d made it an hour earlier.

The billionaire displayed his true strength elsewhere in the debate: the ad breaks, where he showed off his bottomless wallet by buying prime-time spots, a safe first-class compartment insulated from the pitfalls of live TV and interruptions. He also got the occasional assist from a rowdy audience in pricey seats, who cheered and booed like this debate was their last chance to get their money’s worth.

This was not the last go-round; there’s another debate scheduled next month. By then, it will likely be a different, smaller race. But whatever clarification we get will not be thanks to CBS’ Tuesday night production.

It prodded at the front-runner Sanders’ controversial remarks about Cuba without really delving into his democratic-socialist philosophy. It emphasized the urgency, for Democrats, of removing Donald Trump without digging into the case against him.

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The South Carolina debate mainly proved two things. First, that 10 debates into the process, many Democrats are still trying to break through to an audience. And second, that that audience’s interest — driven by serious concerns that the unfocused debate only glancingly addressed — has been a boon for TV news.

The program ended with confusion, as O’Donnell tried to wrap up and King corrected her: There was still a little more to come. Not another question, it turned out, but one more commercial break.

The debate may have been full of sound and fury. The ads always come through loud and clear.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .