Here’s what Maura Healey thought about Elizabeth Warren’s speaking time during the New Hampshire debate
The Massachusetts attorney general said it's "not about the quantity of time," pointing to several examples of how Warren separated herself from candidates like Bernie Sanders.
Maura Healey thinks Elizabeth Warren got all the speaking time she needed.
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“It’s not about the quantity of time, it’s about the quality of time,” the Massachusetts attorney general told reporters after the eighth Democratic presidential primary debate Friday night in Goffstown, New Hampshire.
Still, according to Warren’s supporters, it still wasn’t enough.
With just a few days until the New Hampshire primary and coming off a third-place finish in Iowa, the Massachusetts senator logged the fifth-most speaking time — and was a distant fifth in the number of words said — during the ABC News debate, as the candidates on stage mostly targeted Sen. Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg, the top two winners in the Hawkeye State caucuses. Warren was even asked after the debate why she “seemed to disappear.”
“Had my hand up, wanted to talk,” she said.
Warren’s campaign and supporters chafed at the lack of attention — particularly the fact that Joe Biden, who finished fourth in Iowa, got the most speaking time of any candidate Friday night. Kristen Orthman, the campaign’s communications director, suggested on Twitter that if Warren had tried to interject herself more, she would have been criticized for interrupting.
https://twitter.com/KristenOrthman/status/1226004582859517953
Long branded as the “plans” candidate in the race, Warren has recently worked to both position her campaign as the one that can unite the Democratic party’s insurgent left-wing and establishment factions, while also allaying worries among some voters about whether a female candidate can defeat President Donald Trump. It’s a double standard facing women that some say extended to the primary debate Friday night at Saint Anselm College.
“It looked to me like they absolutely gave the men on the stage more time,” Rep. Deb Haaland, a New Mexico Democrat and Warren supporter, told reporters. “She’d have her hand up and they’d call on someone else. Women have to work twice as hard. Women have to do twice as much. Women have to go above and beyond to prove themselves as candidates.”
Biden (19:35 minutes), Sanders (19:05 minutes), and Buttigieg (18:16 minutes) indeed spoke more than Sen. Amy Klobuchar (16:21 minutes) and Warren (15:59 minutes), according to ABC News. Given the electoral success of Democratic women in the 2018 midterms, Haaland said the disparity was “surprising.”
“It was women who won the House back for Democrats, so they should trust us more to talk about the issues we know resonate with people across this country,” she said.
Healey, who has also endorsed Warren, did think her fellow Bay Stater was able to separate herself during the time she had Friday night, on issues like race and trade. Warren took on Buttigieg over his record on racial issues during his time as mayor of South Bend, Indiana. And she reiterated why she differed with Sanders on the recently reworked trade deal, saying it “makes things somewhat better for workers and for farmers,” even if it didn’t sufficiently address climate change.
“I think that what Elizabeth Warren had to say about race and equity, about economic fairness, about why it was better for her to support something that wasn’t perfect but made things a little bit better — and she’s always going to be somebody looking to compromise to do just that — are the real takeaway points from tonight,” Healey said Friday.
But above all else, Healey said Warren really separates herself on the issue of corruption, “something that a lot of people like to talk about, but they haven’t set forth any idea about how to actually take it on.”
Warren has said her anti-corruption plan would be a top legislative priority, if she is elected president. According to the senator, the bill would “isolate and quarantine the ability of big money to infect the decisions made every day by every branch of our government” by placing lobbying bans on former federal officials, increasing financial disclosure requirement, and limiting the ability of corporations to influence the government’s rule-making process.
“She’s actually talking about it and making it a central issue in her campaign, talking about what needs to happen in really concrete ways and not just giving platitudes like ‘We need to repeal Citizens United,’ which is very easy to say,” Healey said.
While she didn’t name any specific candidate, Sanders — as much as any other Democratic candidate — has long railed against the Citizens United court ruling, which eliminated limits on how much independent groups, like corporations and unions, can spend on political campaigns (for her part, Warren also thinks the 2010 Supreme Court decision has been “disastrous“).
Healey, who has had her own clashes with the gun lobby, pointed to the lack of federal action on universal background checks as an example of where powerful interest groups, like the National Rifle Association, were blocking overwhelmingly popular proposals. Warren’s plan, she suggested, would help level the playing field.
“So much about what Elizabeth Warren stands for is fairness,” Healey said, going on to note another difference between Warren and Sanders.
“And that’s something that separates her from Bernie in this whole discussion about socialist versus capitalism, too,” Healey said. “She believes in a market, and a fair market, right? That’s the [only] way that markets actually can work efficiently and effectively. She did a great job delivering her message tonight, even though she didn’t speak the most words.”
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