2020 Democrats Take the Gloves Off in the Spin Room After a Gentle First Debate

MIAMI — Hundreds of reporters, cameramen, pundits, and campaign staffers fled the baking Miami heat on Wednesday night into the air conditioned hall of the Ziff Opera House, a unit of the Adrienne Arsht Center, the location of the first Democratic Debate in the 2020 election (t-minus 495 days).

Best way to describe the night one of the first Democratic debates? Awkward. MSNBC hosts awkwardly bantered as the candidates took to the stage. Bill de Blasio awkwardly shouted at moderators as they tried to throw to break. Beto O’Rourke awkwardly spoke Spanish as Senators Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren awkwardly looked on. Booker awkwardly tried to match O’Rourke with some Spanish of his own. And for a nightmare minute and a half, awkward technical difficulties forced anchor Chuck Todd to call an untimely commercial break. But fear not for the job security of some poor NBC intern: Todd reportedly told the audience during a break that no staffer will be sacrificed for the screw up.

The debate itself was fairly civil. De Blasio did his best to rankle his fellow Democrats, launching a few obnoxious broadsides. Some candidates sparred. But overall the candidates agreed on quite a bit, all the way down to their fairly uniform answers for the biggest geopolitical threat facing America (China, Russia, climate change, Trump, nukes).

It was after the candidates dismounted the stage and rushed to the spin room that the gloves really came off.

To set the scene: towards the end of the debate, as candidates droned through their closing statements, a fracas struck the middle of the press filing hall. Staffers for each campaign, wielding signs on big sticks signaling their candidates’ locations, assembled frantically. Reporters got into position, awaiting the promised “spin.” Candidates were soon shepherded into the hall to be confronted – and manhandled — by cameramen. They endured gaggles with reporters and ceremonial interviews with Chris Matthews and Andrea Mitchell.

Delaney struck in head by camera following de Blasio pic.twitter.com/e5K8GkbnKQ

— Aidan McLaughlin (@aidnmclaughlin) June 27, 2019

Julian Castro went on the attack. The former HUD secretary and mayor of San Antonio sat for an interview with Chris Matthews, where he blasted O’Rourke for his positions on immigration, calling the former Texas congressman “misinformed.”

“He probably hadn’t done his homework,” Castro sniped, before twisting the knife: “I find it very ironic that a senator from Massachusetts and a senator from New Jersey are the ones who understand this border policy and this law better than Congressman O’Rourke.”

O’Rourke, Castro told reporters, “talks a lot about being from a border community and yet he didn’t understand that we already have other laws that deal with people who are doing human trafficking or drug trafficking.”

O’Rourke tried to make nice. “I think we have the same goal,” he said. “I think he’s got it wrong on how he describes my position.”

Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, who clashed with Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii over the war in Afghanistan, went on the attack against the Hawaii congresswoman in his own comments to reporters.

Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq war, took the first shot during the debate when Ryan said the U.S. must stay “engaged” in Afghanistan.

“Is that what you will tell the parents of those two soldiers who were just killed in Afghanistan?” Gabbard replied. “As a soldier, I will tell you, that answer is unacceptable. We have to bring our troops home from Afghanistan. We are in a place in Afghanistan where we have lost so many lives. We’ve spent so much money.”

In the spin room, Ryan brought up Gabbard’s infamous trip to meet with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2016: “I personally don’t need to be lectured by somebody who’s dining with a dictator who gassed kids,” he told reporters. “I know what I’m talking about. I’m right, and we can’t let these areas be wide open.”

A statement released by Ryan’s communications director was equally scathing.

“We continue to reject Gabbard’s isolationism and her misguided beliefs in foreign policy. We refuse to be lectured by someone who thinks it’s ok to dine with murderous dictators like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad who used chemical weapons on his own people.”

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