Friday, November 16, 2007 at 7:33 am
About Last Night
I'm not good at the kind of scoring that people like our own Mark Halperin do so well after these debates. I can never tell who won or who lost. The fireworks seem to be getting the headlines this morning, and the general consensus is that Hillary Clinton did what she needed to do to stop the bleeding. But this was also the debate that did the best job of clarifying some distinctions among the candidates on the issues. For instance, the exchange between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the pros and cons of the so-called "individual mandate" in health care reform--really the only substantive difference between his plan and hers--was clear and sharp on the tradeoffs of each approach. And the back and forth over raising the $97,000 income cap on Social Security brought into focus the fundamental question that could drive the politics of any reform effort: Is it going to be an insurance program or a welfare program?
Everyone seems to have been complaining that there are far too many of these debates. Maybe the problem has been not the number of them, but rather, the timing. It is really as the candidates go into the home stretch that they finally feel the need to spell out what the real choices are.
Oh, and Ana, I thought the Ross Perot question to Hillary Clinton (though not her dismissive answer about only remembering his charts) was a good one.
About Swampland
Joe Klein is TIME's political columnist and author of six books, most recently Politics Lost. His weekly TIME column, "In the Arena," covers national and international affairs. In 2004 he won the National Headliner Award for best magazine column. Read more
Senior Writer Karen Tumulty has been TIME's National Political Correspondent since 2001, and has also covered the White House and Congress for the magazine. A native of San Antonio, she is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard Business School, where her career choice has significantly lowered the average salary of her graduating class. But she gets lots of free magazines. Read more
Jay Newton-Small Jay Newton-Small covers politics for TIME. She has covered the Bush 43 White House and also Congress from the DeLay era to the present. And, yes, despite the misleading name SHE is a she. Read more
Michael Scherer is a correspondent in TIME's Washington bureau covering the 2008 presidential campaign. He has worked national assignments for Mother Jones magazine and Salon.com. Read more
Amy Sullivan is a senior editor at TIME magazine, and author of the book The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap (Scribner, 2008). A Michigan native, she holds degrees from the University of Michigan and Harvard Divinity School. She writes about religion and politics for TIME, but no longer answers to the name "Bible Girl." Read more
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