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Unsanitized: Election Edition, for Oct. 23, 2020

Debate Night in America

Trump and Biden in the final high-profile event before voting closes

 

A debate night watch party at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. (Jeff
Chiu/AP Photo)

Universal Family Care

Here are the final stories from our special issue on universal family
care :

* Robert Kuttner interviews Sen. Elizabeth Warren

about the importance of care infrastructure.

* Our fabulous interns Shera Avi-Yonah, Blaise Malley, and Alex J.
Rouhandeh interviewed eight people
caught up in the
care economy, as providers, as workers, as caregivers, as care
recipients. They tell their stories.

Please browse the whole issue at prospect.org/familycare

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Trump Finally Told About Consequences

The only significant date of the presidential election was the day in
early March when everyone realized we were headed into lockdown. It
certainly wasn't September 29 or October 22, the two dates of the
presidential debates. These things are over-analyzed and
over-determined. But as long as I'm here and committed to writing
about the election until the final day (and hey, with coronavirus case
counts rising to their highest level ever
,
it was a perfect moment to pause writing about the pandemic!), I might
as well articulate some thoughts.

I've read

a theory that the debate rules, giving each candidate two uninterrupted
minutes to answer the first question of a new topic by cutting the
opponent's mic, as well as the implied threat of muting later on,
subdued Trump, at least at the outset. He was also clearly prepped to be
"likable," which I guess translated into Trump-ese means "somber." He
got revved up a bit when the talk turned to Hunter Biden, but the
general "today, he became a president" praise seems pretty misplaced.

That was especially evident when Trump was forced to confront something
he has completely shied away from this year: his immigration record
.
NBC News broke this week

that 545 children separated from their parents in 2017 have yet to be
reunited because the parents cannot be found. It's an encapsulation of
the incompetence, cruelty, and ideological rigidity of the Trump regime.
And Trump, looking actually uncomfortable discussing it, had no answer
for his actions.

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He started by claiming the kids were brought in by coyotes and gangs to
get migrants to pass through into the country, but these kids were in
fact forcibly separated from parents at the border. He pivoted to talk
about the cages being built by the Obama administration, which is true
-Nick
Miroff of the Washington Post has a good explanation
of it-but
building the cages is not fully relevant to using them for the purpose
of separating parents from children. Then Trump touted how clean the
facilities are (which ironically is exactly what the Obama
administration said when the cages were built), which again is
irrelevant. Then he closed by saying he ended the policy

so there's no problem. Of course, there's a big problem for 545
orphaned children.

Trump implemented an indefensible policy, deliberately, to frighten
immigrants from entering the country, and now he can't defend it.
That's why immigration, a defining feature of Trump's rise in the
Republican Party, has all but disappeared from his campaign agenda. This
too makes Trump more like a normal Republican: he wants to hide from
voters the consequences of his actions.

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On the Biden Side

Joe Biden had an interesting exchange in that immigration section as
well, one that will give any close observer of the Democratic primary
some whiplash. Asked about record deportations and family detentions
under the Obama administration, Biden forthrightly said "we made a
mistake." He flew away from Obama's immigration position, the standard
historical Democratic line of being tough on the border to show
seriousness before seeking a path to citizenship.

That wasn't the only move away from Obama, from a candidate that used
Obama as a human shield to secure the nomination. Biden rejected
austerity
by
lauding the ability of the federal government to deficit spend to make
up for revenue shortfalls in the states. He talked about "Bidencare,"
mainly by adding a public option (though the rhetoric he's using is
very confused; he appears to be calling the public option a fallback
option for states that didn't expand Medicaid
) and
negotiating with pharmaceutical companies over price, which Obama also
ran on but then deep-sixed in a deal with the drug industry.

Biden called climate change

"an existential threat to humanity" and articulated a just transition,
in association with labor, to move away from fossil fuels. The Trump
team will try to get a lot of mileage over the final 11 days about Biden
"closing down the oil industry," which Biden decided to clean up in
post-debate remarks (he said he meant phasing out fossil fuel
subsidies). But the section where he discussed "fence lines" was a
powerful call for environmental justice for downtrodden communities.

Biden mocked the idea that regular people should care about the movement
of the stock market. He gave the most significant defense of a $15 an
hour minimum wage that has ever been seen in general-election
presidential politics, completely dismissing (correctly) the idea that
it will crush businesses. (The minimum wage has been popular wherever
it's been put to voters, including deep-red states, so this was a
no-brainer.)

I have few illusions about who we're getting in Joe Biden if he wins,
and the range of possibilities
for a Biden
administration. But the fact that he felt necessary to pull away from
his predecessor Obama on austerity and deportations, that he felt
necessary to go populist on wages, signals where Biden thinks the
electorate is at. And that will be important for his potential future
decision-making.

**Read all of our Election 2020 news here**

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Pandemic Watch

* As I mentioned, the highest one-day case total

was yesterday. Trump made and then retracted a little news in the
debate, saying there would be a vaccine announced within "weeks." The
problem is that there's no actual funding for distributing the
vaccine; that was part of the endlessly stalled stimulus bill.

* The experience of Iowa, which never locked down but is still seeing a
depressed economy
,
signals that Americans aren't idiots, and they don't need their
government to tell them they can't get Jalapeno Poppers at TGI
Friday's to know that it's dangerous. Until the virus is eradicated,
we will have a serious demand shortfall.

* PPP loan forgiveness is still a black box
.

**Read all of our Unsanitized reports here**

We Really Can't Do This Without You!

Today I Learned

* Here's video
of my
"Unsanitized Live" event we did last week with the School of Visual Arts
in New York City. (YouTube)

* This was a long-awaited article on the right

about Hunter Biden's business partner, and it completely absolves Joe
Biden of wrongdoing. (Wall Street Journal)

* More ballots have been cast early, 12 days out, than the entire early
vote

in 2016. (Reuters)

* Bernie Sanders for Labor Secretary
?
(Politico)

* A bipartisan commission, as Biden has proposed

for reforming the court system, is what you propose when you don't
want to do anything. (New Republic)

* Another installment in Ryan Grim's continuing series on grassroots
organizing

in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. (The Intercept)

* Surveillance at the polls

in Philadelphia. (New York Times)

* Georgia is definitely going into overtime
.
(Axios)

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