While Bernie and Biden fought, Elizabeth Warren shone — and Julian Castro made an obvious bid for VP

In his worst moment of the night, Biden shrugged and said, 'This is America' in response to Bernie's passionate plea about healthcare. It didn't go down well

The third Democratic debate started and ended with Julian Castro. “I worked under President Obama too!” the former secretary of housing and urban development reminded the crowd, when Joe Biden got a little too carried away with his own record under the popular former Democratic president; later, he made the charge that “Biden wants to take credit for the good things Obama did” while ignoring the bad.

“Our problems didn’t start with Trump,” Castro said in his opening statement, “and we won’t solve them by going back to old ideas.” To hammer the point home, he called for an administration of “young, diverse Americans” — and then, an hour or so later, he said directly to Joe Biden, “I’m fulfilling the legacy of Barack Obama and you’re not.” There were audible gasps from the crowd.

The man America once knew as Uncle Joe has been leaning on his record as Obama’s VP for a long time, and his opponents have now begun to dismantle that crutch. When he spoke about the realities of trying to bring in gun control legislation, Kamala Harris laughed at him and said: “Hey Joe, instead of saying we can’t, let’s try saying ‘yes we can’.” When he was asked by host Jorge Ramos whether he could admit the Obama administration made “mistakes” on immigration, he floundered, said (for the second time in the night) “Well, things have changed” and then wandered off-topic before being told by an unamused Ramos: “You didn’t answer the question.”

Perhaps the worst moment of the night for Biden was an unguarded response he made to Bernie Sanders’ passionate plea for universal healthcare. When Sanders said that other developed countries similar to America have nationalized healthcare systems which function well, while the US leaves millions uninsured and desperate, Biden shrugged and said, “This is America.” It was a split second and a short sentence, but it was revealing — and it was so unbelievably flippant that I had to double-check with colleagues that I’d heard him right.

Biden had already mocked Sanders’ Medicare-for-All plan in an earlier exchange, which didn’t make him look especially forward-looking or relatable: “Hey, let’s have a big idea!” he said derisively, while claiming that Sanders and Warren would never find the money to support their health plan. In a race where most candidates have borrowed extensively from Sanders’ 2016 policies, and where properly left-leaning progressive politics are having a renaissance, Biden has been trying to position himself so far as a “steady hand” and a trustworthy seasoned operator. This debate, he took it too far in the other direction. He looked like he was mocking the enthusiasm of young voters and the efforts of his well-qualified peers. He looked like he was unable to modernize.

Sanders didn’t put in a fantastic show, either. In his usual manner, he picked three issues to run with — climate change, Medicare-for-All, and “greed and corruption” on Wall Street helping to depress wages elsewhere — and brought every question back to them. He did it when it wasn’t relevant, and he did it when it was. In his closing statement, he said almost exactly the same thing as he said in his opening one, with more of an emphasis on his long political career (this strategy is a rare one he has in common with Biden.) The only time he went off-book was when he said he was “proud to get an F rating from the NRA year after year” — which would have had more of an effect if he hadn’t been upstaged by Beto O’Rourke calling for compulsory gun confiscations in an emotional speech about shootings in his community (“Hell yes, we’re gonna take your AR-15 and your AK-47!”) It wasn’t that Sanders floundered in the way that Biden so obviously did; it was just that his consistency is becoming his downfall in a race where others are constantly updating and changing their techniques.

It seemed clear that Castro had Biden in his sights tonight, perhaps because he is positioning himself to be VP for a higher polling progressive candidate such as Warren or Sanders. It was clearly an unexpected attack for Biden, who himself went on the offensive against Warren and Sanders, his two biggest threats, early on. Bernie took the bait, getting increasingly worked up in defense of his progressive policies, which Biden repeatedly tried to paint as fiscally unwise, pie-in-the-sky ideas which would damage the American economy. Many love Bernie for his passion, but his frustrated gesticulations did look over-the-top beside Biden’s calculated composure. The person who really won out from this catalogue of exchanges, however, was Elizabeth Warren.

Warren, who was classically prepared and confident, allowed Bernie to take the initial hits from Biden before smiling and calmly reiterating that the proposals Uncle Joe was attacking were viable, were modern, and were well-thought-out. Biden ended up coming across as cynical and stuck in his ways, while Sanders appeared wound-up and excessively ideological. “I know what’s broken, I know how to fix it, and I will get it done,” Warren promised, while peppering her anecdotes with mentions of her military family, her early career in teaching, and the “predatory lenders” who prey on “ex-service members”. This was a socialism story for middle America, and it drew a disproportionate amount of cheers from the Texan crowd.

Two others worth mentioning are Cory Booker — who was finally given a good amount of airtime, and gave a lot of it to issues which deserve more discussion than they get, such as environmental justice and lead poisoning epidemics — and Andrew Yang. Yang, who has amassed a huge social media following over the past few weeks, had promised a “big surprise” at the debate, which turned out to be the announcement that he would use his campaign donations to fund a universal basic income (“Freedom Dividend”) for 10 families over the next year. “It’s original, I’ll give you that,” Pete Buttigieg quipped in response.

There was a lot of speculation before this debate about what might happen when Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden shared a stage together for the first time. Now we have our answer: Warren came out on top thanks to her trademark articulacy and concentration on policy, and Biden gave in to his worst impulses and became a scornful, skeptical relic. Where Biden was concerned that we should “stop America becoming a victim of terrorists” — a fair enough aspiration, but one which didn’t go much further than that — Warren was talking about a global strategy to eradicate terrorism, “with our allies in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America”. Where Biden thought “Americans want choice” in their healthcare which would allow them to stay with private insurers, Warren merely smiled the smile of an endlessly patient mentor and said, “I’ve never met anyone who likes their health insurance company. They like their doctors.”

It’s clear Biden hadn’t prepared for his legacy to be used against him. He looked desperately in need of a modernizing force today, and at the times when he attacked Warren and Sanders, perhaps he should have been cozying up to them. After all, a Biden/Warren ticket — or even a Biden/Bernie one — might be the unifying solution that gets enough Democrats to the polls to kick Donald Trump out of the White House. Though today’s debate makes me personally long for a Warren/Castro one instead.