Consensus and Collegiality at the Brown and Black Presidential Forum

Through sleet, snow, freezing rain, and technical difficulties, seven Democratic candidates took the stage at Des Moines North High School Saturday night for the 2008 Brown and Black Presidential Forum, the longest-standing minority-focused presidential forum in the country.

In contrast with the recent GOP presidential debate in St. Petersburg, Fla., Saturday’s Democratic forum was collegial and upbeat.  Candidates did not attack each other directly or indirectly, and moderators Michele Norris and Ray Suarez and other questioners were specific but passive.

As promised, though, some of the questions were a bit uncomfortable.  In a few cases, candidates took positions that could cause them difficulties going forward — in Iowa and beyond.To kick off the forum, Sen. Hillary Clinton was asked about mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines as part of a question about disproportionate incarceration rates, an issue that has motivated several conferences, discussions, and meetings in Iowa’s African-American community in recent months.  If there’s a hot issue in that community right now, incarceration rates might be it.

Clinton said she would “tackle the disparity” by, among other things, reexamining the current disparities between mandatory minimum sentences for possession of crack cocaine and powder cocaine.  But asked whether she would make new sentencing guidelines retroactive, Clinton said no.  “I think that it definitely needs to be prospective,” she said, but “On principle, I have problems with retroactivity.”

Although her focus on mandatory minimums appeared to strike the right chord for audience members, her answer on retroactivity did not.  Each of Clinton’s rivals said they would support making new guidelines retroactive, which served not only to clarify the other candidates’ positions, but also to reinforce the issue in audience members’ minds.

Later, Clinton was asked to clarify her position on granting driver licenses to illegal immigrants, an issue which caused her trouble at a previous debate when other candidates (and, after the fact, many pundits) accused her of equivocating.  This time, she had an answer ready, which she delivered clearly and concisely.  But regardless, her answer — she’s against the policy — is unpopular in the Latino community.  Other candidates were not asked the question, leaving Sen. Chris Dodd and former Sen. John Edwards with the good fortune of not having to agree with Clinton’s position.

One of the more interesting questions posed Saturday night dealt with US-Cuban relations.  Norris asked Clinton whether she would support normalizing relations with Cuba, and Clinton gave an answer that some might have taken as a ‘yes.’  “Well, I think we’re going to have that opportunity, because I believe that, when Fidel Castro finally does pass on, there will be a tremendous pent up desire” for democracy in Cuba.

That might have passed as a complete, sufficient answer in front of the Iowa audience in Des Moines (it did draw some hisses), but it is a significantly more complicated issue among voters in another politically important state, Florida, where large numbers of Cuban exiles parse politicians’ words meticulously when they make statements about Cuba policy.  So Norris pressed Clinton and the rest of the candidates on stage about whether the United States should normalize relations with Cuba before its dictator, Castro, dies.  Rep. Dennis Kucinich was the only candidate to respond with an unequivocal “yes,” and Dodd gave an emphatic but more nuanced answer in the affirmative.  The rest of the field offered a fairly homogeneous set of qualified nos.  Although each candidate has pledged not to campaign in Florida, a state whose primary date violates rules established by the Democratic National Committee, it will still be an important battleground state in the general election.

The Brown and Black Forum also offered candidates the opportunity to ask questions of each other from time to time, but only one question — posed by Dodd, directed to Edwards — capitalized on it.  Dodd forced Edwards to defend his votes in favor of bankruptcy “reform” legislation which has made it more difficult for Americans to recover from financial losses.

Edwards’s response, “I was wrong,” was well-delivered, but it may begin to wear on the Iowans who have been paying close attention to the former senator for the past year.  He has now used it to explain away a lot of apparent contradictions in his candidacy, from his war vote to his mansion to his working for a hedge fund.  A candidate can only issue blanket mea culpas so many times before voters are likely to sense a theme, whether or not all of the attacks are fair.

When Sen. Barack Obama was given his chance to ask another candidate a question, he appeared to be caught off guard, almost as if he did not even know it was coming.  His used his opportunity to display his depth of understanding of racial tensions and hate crimes in the premise of his question, but when it came time for the actual question part, he didn’t have much to go on.  So he asked Joe Biden to talk about a hate crimes bill for a second, and it wasn’t clear what he was getting at.

Kucinich raised eyebrows when he was told to ask a candidate a question by asking himself about health care.  He used it as an opportunity to talk about his proposal for a single-payer, not-for-profit system.

Clinton asked all of the candidates to join her in a commitment to fight HIV/AIDS domestically, but she did not press anyone on policy specifics.

Edwards asked Obama to join him in committing to raise the minimum wage to $9.50/hour and indexing it to inflation.  Obama said yes (a no answer could have caused a rift).

Biden asked the full field whether they would support pending legislation to eliminate disparities between minimum sentences for crack cocaine possession and powder cocaine possession entirely (to a 1:1 ratio).  It could have been dicey had any candidate said no, but each candidate pledged support.

And although rumors surfaced last week about exclusivity in the planning for the event, all visible chairs in the auditorium were filled and the generous audience doled out applause to all the candidates present.

It was an uneventful evening, where most candidates agreed with each other most of the time.  If any question went unanswered at the Brown and Black Forum, it was this: Given such a broad consensus around the issues discussed Saturday night, why hasn’t more already been done?