Jimmy Kimmel
The fourth Democratic debate, held in Columbus, Ohio, on Tuesday night, was a long affair in which “12 Democrats took to the stage to angrily agree with each other for hours”, said Jimmy Kimmel.
“Why are there 12 candidates in the debate now?” he asked, since the last debate had 10. “You can’t subtract candidates and then add some back in … You don’t go to the Final Four and suddenly you’re back to the Elite Eight.”
Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, for example, is “eight laps behind and stopped to get lunch and she’s still in the race”, said Kimmel. “It doesn’t make sense.
“They need to pare this down. It’s like the menu at the Cheesecake Factory – there’s too much to choose from.” Kimmel then proceeded to compare each candidate to an item on the notoriously overstuffed Cheesecake Factory menu. Joe Biden is the old-fashioned burger, Elizabeth Warren the super antioxidant salad “because it seems kinda good but also like it’s trying a little bit too hard”.
Bernie is the chicken salad sandwich “all over your chin”, while Mayor Pete is the children’s brunch. Beto O’Rourke and Andrew Yang are “the roadside sliders – they’re always falling off their skateboards.” Cory Booker is shrimp with angel hair, “hold the angel hair”.
“Amy Klobuchar is Renee’s Special because nobody knows who Renee is either,” and Tulsi Gabbard is “the luau salad – Hawaiian and mostly nuts.”
Kamala Harris is avocado toast – “from California, and toast” – and Julián Castro is “the baja chicken tacos, because he’s mildly spicy and he’s a twin, so you get two”. Billionaire candidate Tom Steyer, in his first debate, is the impossible burger “because those are his chances of winning”.
And all 12 candidates, despite their differences, are “trying to defeat the world famous pumpkin cheesecake, Donald Trump”.
Trevor Noah
On the Daily Show, Trevor Noah also recapped the fourth Democratic debate, the first since the House launched an impeachment inquiry into Trump. While the impeachment drama was a point of agreement among the candidates, the dominant issue of healthcare – particularly whether government-run insurance should be an option or the only option — revealed divisions among the candidates.
“But the thing that got the crowd going was when the OG of Medicare stepped into the game and showed everyone why they should put respect on his name,” said Noah, referring to Senator Bernie Sanders, who characteristically railed against corporate healthcare. “The issue is whether the Democratic party has the guts to stand up to the healthcare industry which made $100bn in profit,” Sanders said. “If we don’t have the guts to do that, if all we can do is take their money, we should be ashamed of ourselves.”
The #DemDebate stage narrowed from 10 to… 12 candidates? Trevor went LIVE to break it down: pic.twitter.com/2Fywe7uyfy
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) October 16, 2019
“You cannot deny, no one speaks about healthcare with the passion that Bernie does,” said Noah. “I also have a suspicion that that’s the same speech he gave every time the nurses try to give him pills.”
Because the debate was in Ohio, a state ravaged by the opioid crisis, the moderators asked candidates about holding pharmaceutical companies accountable for their addictive drugs. Klobuchar came out particularly strong: “The people that should pay for this, the people who should pay for the treatment, are the very people who got people hooked and killed them in the first place, and that is the people who are manufacturing these opioids.”
Noah “100%” agreed with Klobuchar, he said. “Drug companies should have to pay to rehabilitate all the people that they got addicted.”
But he also joked it should go beyond drugs.“If you create something addictive, you should be responsible for making it harder to consume. Like Oreos – if they’re going to make those cookies so goddamn addictive, the least they could do is like every fourth cookie put a mousetrap inside.”
According to Noah, the weirdest part of the night was “when Kamala Harris started a real-life Twitter beef” by criticizing Elizabeth Warren for not co-signing her pledge, via tweet, that Twitter should remove Donald Trump from the platform.
“I’ll be honest, I kinda understand Warren’s point here,” said Noah. “We need Trump on Twitter. It’s the only way we can monitor what he’s up to, otherwise he’s doing that shit in secret. You’ve gotta think of Twitter as a presidential baby monitor.”
.png?w=600)
