Lessons from the So-Called New Hampshire Presidential Debate

What did we learn from the so-called New Hampshire Democratic presidential debate?  The simple answer is that if they keep it up the Democratic Party will debate itself into losing the 2020 presidential race.
The New Hampshire debate, like all of the previous ones over the last few months, was  not a debate.  They have been simply media events, Jerry Springer shows full of one-liners, petty attacks, and vacuous positioning on issues that hardly count as debates and  where CNN or the moderators egg on the participants.  Real debates are when individuals take positions on issues, argue to points, and provide reasoned arguments and evidence to support their claims.  This was not what happened in New Hampshire or in any of the previous debates. There was no substance here.  To recall a famous line Walter Mondale once used against Gary Hart: “Where’s the beef?”
What we saw in New Hampshire was predictably boring.  The front runners Buttigieg and Sanders were attacked by Klobuchar and Biden who has to recover from Iowa.  Warren, Steyer, and Yang did their best to be relevant, and all of them tried to argue that the reason to vote for them was that they hated Trump the most or they were the most electable.  None of them, bar Sanders, really spent much time articulating their narrative for why they should be president, what they hoped to do, or what they sought to accomplish in a meaningful way.  It was a boring Jerry Springer show. 
What one took away was a choice: Vote for an inexperienced frontrunner who takes money from billionaires or vote for a billionaire directly who was a mayor of a city 86X more populous, or vote for me because I tell  folksy Midwestern jokes, because I will do well in South Carolina, or because even though I did bad in Iowa and probably will do so in New Hampshire, I am still the most electable.
Moreover, the debate seemed to show that there is a collective action or tragedy of the commons problem with the Democratic Party.  By that, Ronald Reagan famously declared the Eleventh Commandment that: “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.”  For Democrats their Eleventh Commandment seems to be: “Thou shalt only speak ill of any fellow Democrat.”  It is in the collective interest of the Democratic presidential candidates and party not to attack one another, but it is in the interest of each on individually to do so.  The presidential candidates view the presidential race as a zero sum game, I win only if you lose.  The path to the nomination is dirty and attack everyone else, rendering you the last one standing,  fully damaged by the process.
The two biggest winners of the so-called  New Hampshire presidential debate were Donald Trump and Michael Bloomberg.  All agreed Trump needed to go but failed to say much beyond that in terms of a clear vision of where to go next.  All of them also could hear Bloomberg’s absence as deafening, feeling the need to attack him because as one watches his ads you get the sense that “Mike will get it done” gut the others are clueless regarding what its is or how to get it done.
The biggest losers were the Democratic Party and the American public.   This media event simply torn one another down and did little to repair the debacle of Iowa.  The American public, still registering high disapproval for Trump and yearning for an alternative, did not find it here, at least with the format offered.