Donald Trump's trying to sic Ukraine on him and Elizabeth Warren's taking the polling lead from him turned out to be the best things that could have happened to Joe Biden.
Last night's fourth Democratic presidential debate was an evening for Joe to be off-limits--mostly--and for Elizabeth to be a lightning rod.
Biden was mostly off-limits because Trump had temporarily immunized him among Democrats by committing an impeachable act to try to hurt him.
Warren was a lightning rod because she's emerged as the other candidate to beat, and the one not temporarily off-limits.
So Biden did not sustain the most frequent or strongest attacks, as he had before. Warren did. He did not stand for the most face time, as he had before. Warren did.
When Biden's name came up, it was mostly early and in the safe context of Trump's abusing his office to try to hinge federal aid to Ukraine on that country's investigating the former vice president to help this preposterous president politically.
None of the other 11 Democratic candidates on stage would dare criticize Biden even indirectly for the fact that his son unethically and improperly cashed in on Biden's vice presidency to make big bucks in Ukraine and China. Doing that would have seemed to side with Trump, whom these candidates fell over each other to describe in the worst possible terms--albeit entirely justifiably.
Biden got his usual treatment only toward the end of the debate mainly because he started it. Asked about any real differences with the other candidates, he said he had gotten things done and none of them had. That led to sniping between him, Warren and Bernie Sanders about pragmatism--Joe's--to dramatic change, like Warren's and Bernie's. But no new ground was plowed.
Warren had such a bad night early that she reminded me of robotic Marco Rubio saying the same thing over and over again as Chris Christie exposed him as a stuck needle in a pivotal Republican debate nearly four years ago.
The simple question was whether Warren's Medicare-for-all plan would entail higher taxes on the middle class, as Bernie Sanders acknowledges is plainly so of his essentially identical plan.
The answer is yes. It's yes, but.
Alas, Warren was pre-programmed not to say that, even conditionally. She was pre-programmed to say only that she would support no legislation that would raise middle-class "costs."
She hoped that would suffice. And perhaps it ought to, if explained.
But her one-note repetition and avoidance showed her unwilling or unable to introduce the flexibility of unprepped candor into her debate repertoire.
The answer is that, sure, Medicare-for-all will require higher taxes on the middle class, but only on the condition that those costs would be more than offset by reduced health-care costs and better health-care security and healthier lives.
She wouldn't say that. Her message focus didn't permit her to say that.
She was hardly destroyed, but merely exposed by the exchange.
Warren fared much better a little later, and recovered some strength, when several of the candidates chose to attack her proposed wealth tax on the very highest billionaire incomes.
She seemed to extemporize deftly when she said she couldn't understand why the other candidates would call her "punitive" toward successful people. She said billionaires should be admired for accomplishing much, but that they'd done it using public services everyone had helped pay for and that it wouldn't hurt them to pay a little more to enhance opportunities of others.
In the end, Warren fashioned a mediocre evening.
But the best evening belonged to Silent Joe--forgotten, kid-gloved and energy-conserved so he could pull off a few decent and only mildly halting moments that amounted to his best debate performance yet.
The evening probably provided renewed momentum for Biden's campaign essence, which is that he is the candidate most plausible as Trump's general-election vanquisher.
In a climate in which Trump would lose to an amiable blank slate but perhaps survive against an opponent with baggage, Biden had his amiable blank-slate bona fides restored, at least for an evening that he was pretty much allowed to take off.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 10/16/2019