New Hampshire Debate

For some reason I decided to watch the whole Democrat's pre New Hampshire debate(clearly nothing better to do at 4am...). I assume it could later be rewatched from this link if anyone is interested in wasting three hours of their life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JCTY6MxJ4I

As objectively ranking the candidates is pretty much impossible, let's just group them with some thoughts on each of them:

Probably the winner: Kloubachar - Admittedly, it is easier to win the debate if you are clearly the no. 5 candidate as no one is going after you. Still, managed to launch some good attacks against the frontrunners and capture the audience with remarks about Trump being pissed off at Denmark for not getting to buy Greenland etc. However, all of this is unlikely to help her break out and I expect her to drop out fairly soon.

Adequate(in no particular ranked order): Biden, Sanders, Buttigieg - All of them stood their ground and mostly managed to parry the attacks launched against them, but had some sloppy moments. Sanders is still preaching to the choir and not trying to capture more moderate voters. Biden is still too often clunky in his answers. Buttigieg failed to parry accusations of black citizen's arrests raising in South Bend during his tenure as mayor(yes, the moderator actually had the wrong numbers and accused him for no reason, but the blame still lies on him for not parrying those accusations). All of them are probably going to stick around in the race for a while.

Out of the picture: Warren, Yang - Warren's momentum as a top-tier candidate seems to be passing. She fails to get the air-time and has not said anything new for months. While she will stick around for a while, I think that her chance of winning the nomination has become almost non-existent. Yang is just weak in a debate format. He fails to be assertive enough for the air-time and it shows. I would expect him to be the next one to drop out of the race. However, I think that him becoming the VP candidate for any eventual nominee is quite a realistic possibility.

Tell me again, why are you there?: Steyer - His performance would have been amazing if only one aspect had been different. What aspect? He would have had to be the debate moderator, not the candidate. He was amazing at pointing out the flaws and strengths of every other candidate and made good bulletpoints what will be important in the national election. However, he completely failed to say why HE should be the candidate and what HIS exact views are. His goal in this race is puzzling to me, so his next moves are also hard to predict.

I also want to comment on one topic that still annoys me about Democrat's debates. The way they discuss so-called 'systematic racism' is quite absurd and won't go down well with the general electorate. The debate moderators and all the candidates, except maybe Yang/Biden/Buttigieg, look at the greater incarceration and arrest rates of African Americans as a 'systematic racism' issue. Which it clearly is not. If racism was completely eliminated, African Americans would still have higher incarceration and arrest rates. It should be viewed as an economic and educational issue and solving this takes time. It won't improve by removing all racism from the society with some sort of magical wand.

Uh, time to sleep now, I guess? :)