The frontrunners — Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — tangled over healthcare, while other candidates looking to make their mark went after Elizabeth Warren. Pete Buttigieg and Beto O'Rourke clashed over guns. The one issue that united all the candidates was impeachment. Here are the key moments of Tuesday's debate.

Biden on Ukraine: We did nothing wrong

Biden declined to answer directly a question about why it was OK for his son, Hunter, to serve on the board of a Ukrainian company while Biden was serving as vice president given his recent announcement that no one in his family would be involved in foreign business if he’s elected president next year.

“My son did nothing wrong,” Biden said. “I did nothing wrong.”

Biden instead focused his response on impeaching President Donald Trump, noting that Trump on three separate occasions has invited foreign leaders to get involved in U.S. elections.

“Rudy Giuliani, the president and his thugs have already proven that they, in fact, are flat lying,” he said. “What we have to do now is focus on Donald Trump. He doesn’t want me to be the candidate. He’s going after me because he knows if I get the nomination, I will beat him like a drum.”

Later, in response to another question, Sen. Cory Booker circled back to the issue of Biden and his son, accusing the moderators of doing Trump’s bidding.

“I am having deja vu all over again,” Booker said. “I saw this play in 2016's election. We are literally using Donald Trump's lies and the second issue we cover is elevating a lie and attacking a statesman. That was so offensive. The only person sitting at home that was enjoying that was Donald Trump seeing we are distracting from his malfeasance and selling out of his office.”

Sanders goes after Biden’s record

One of the central arguments underpinning Joe Biden’s candidacy is his ability to work across the aisle and get things done.

Sanders wasn’t having it on debate night when Biden again swiped at Medicare for All as unworkable.

“Joe, you talked about working with Republicans and getting things done,” Sanders said. “But you know what you also got done — and I say this as a good friend — you got the disastrous war in Iraq done. You got a bankruptcy bill, which is hurting middle class families all over this country. You got trade agreements like NAFTA and PNTR [permanent normal trade relations] with China done, which have cost us 4 million jobs. Let's get to Medicare for all. If we stood together, we could create the greatest health care system in the world.”

Said Biden: “We can do that without Medicare for all. We can do that by adding a public option.”

Warren gets hit like a front-runner

No candidates saw much benefit from attacking Biden in previous debates. So it appears they decided to take on a different frontrunner: Warren.

Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard and O’Rourke all went after Warren in the first half of the debate on issues ranging from her support to Medicare for All, trade deals and automation, a wealth tax and foreign policy.

Warren held her own, notably speaking nearly twice as much as the next candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, in the first hour of the debate. But she also got some assistance from Sen. Cory Booker, who warned that the attacks were only benefiting Trump’s reelection campaign.

“We’ve got one shot to make Donald Trump a one-term president, and how we talk about each other in this debate actually really matters,” Booker said. “I’ve had the privilege of working with or being friends with everybody on this stage, and tearing each other down because we have a different plan, to me, is unacceptable.”

“I have seen this script before,” he added. “It didn’t work in 2016, and it will be disaster for us in 2020.”

Sanders says he’s healthy

As the debate moderators turned the topic of conversation to candidates and their health, Sanders noted that he is “healthy” and “feeling great.”

“And Sen. Sanders is in favor of medical marijuana. I wanna make sure that’s clear as well,” Booker interjected with a smile.

“I’m not on it tonight,” a similarly smiling Sanders shot back.

Asked how a 78-year-old candidate who recently suffered a heart attack can assure voters he’s fit to handle the presidency, Sanders invited supporters to his upcoming rally in Queens, New York.

“We're gonna have a special guest at that event, and we are gonna be mounting a vigorous campaign all over this country,” he said. “That is how I think I can reassure the American people.”

“But let me take this moment, if I might, to thank so many people from all over this country, including many of my colleagues up here, for their love, for their prayers, for their well wishes,” he continued. “And I just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart, and I’m so happy to be back here with you this evening.”

One thing Dems can all agree on: impeachment

Biden's answer followed questions on on the biggest issue to grip U.S. politics in more than a decade: the looming impeachment of the president after he may have improperly pressured Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son.

Warren, who first called for Trump’s impeachment this spring after reading Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report about alleged Russian collusion and the obstruction of his inquiry, said she should have been listened to months ago.

“That didn't happen. Look what happened as a result: Donald Trump broke the law again in the summer. Broke it again this fall. You know, we took a constitutional oath. That is that no one is above the law, and that includes the president of the United States,” she said.

Sanders followed up by calling Trump “the most corrupt president in the history of the country. I think that the house will find him guilty ... He is enriching himself while using the oval office.”

Biden echoed those criticisms, while Harris said that Trump has admitted he is guilty.

“He has committed crimes in plain sight. It's shocking but he told us who he was. Maya Angelou told us, listen to somebody when they tell you who they are,” Harris said. “I don't think this impeachment process is going to take very long, because as a former prosecutor, I know a confession when I see it.”

Mayor Pete and Beto clash on guns

Buttigieg and O’Rourke have increasingly feuded over guns in the runup to the debate and finally clashed after the former Texas congressman was unable to say how he’d enforce a mandatory buyback of assault rifles, a proposal the mayor has called an unworkable act of “confiscation.”

“Congressman, you just made it clear you are don't know how this is actually going to take weapons off the streets,” Buttigieg said, accusing O’Rourke of imposing “purity tests.”

O’Rourke bristled at the term and suggested Buttigieg was beholden to polls and consultants, prompting the mayor to shoot back that “the problem isn’t the polls. The problem is the policy. I don't need lessons from you on morals, political or personal. The problem is not other Democrats who don't agree with your particular idea of how to handle this. The problem is the National Rifle Association and their enablers in Congress and we should be united in taking the fight to them.”

“That's a mischaracterization,” O’Rourke replied, faulting Buttigieg for calling his proposal a “shiny object,” a phrase O’Rourke said was a “slap in the face” to shooting survivors.

Buttigieg implied that the problem with O’Rourke’s confiscation plan is that it will undermine efforts to ban assault weapons generally after the former congressman said, “hell yes, we’re gonna take your guns.”

“On guns, we are this close to an assault weapons ban,” Buttigieg said. “And we're going to get wrapped around the axle whether it's ‘hell, yes, we're going to take your guns’?”

Democrats split on health care — again

The candidates were divided between the more progressive wing that wants Medicare for All and the more moderate candidates who want to build on Obamacare by offering a so-called “public option” that creates a government-run program but also keeps private insurance

And, as in previous debates, Warren steadfastly refused to say if taxes would go up to give everyone government-run insurance, giving Buttigieg an opening.

“A yes or no question that didn't get a yes or no answer. This is why people are so frustrated,” Buttigieg said, looking at Warren. “Your signature is to have a plan for everything, except this.”

Warren countered that “Costs will go up for wealthy, for big corporations. They will not go up for middle class families. I will not sign a bill into law that raises their costs. Because costs are what people care about.”

Sanders, noting (again) that he “wrote the damn bill” on Medicare for all, said that “deductibles are gone. All out-of-pocket expenses are gone ... At the end of the day, the overwhelming majority of people will save money on their health care bills. I do think it is appropriate to acknowledge that taxes will go up. They will go up significantly for the wealthy and for virtually everybody, the tax increase will be substantially less -- substantially less than what they were paying for premiums and out-of-pocket expansions.”

Warren still wouldn’t acknowledge it, leading Sen. Amy Klobuchar to call her out.

“Bernie is being honest. We owe it to the American people to tell them where we will send the invoice. The boldest idea is to not trash Obamacare but to do exactly what Obama wanted to do from the beginning and that's have a public option,” Klobuchar said.

The billionaire talks about whether to tax the wealthy

For most of the first hour of the debate, the top issue was wealth. Who has it and who does it. And few have it the way that Tom Steyer, the billionaire, does.

So it seemed like a perfect time for Sanders, an anti-wealth crusader who has nevertheless become a millionaire himself, to take a shot at Steyer.

“The truth is, we cannot afford to continue this level of income and wealth inequality. We cannot afford a billionaire class whose greed and corruption has been at war with the working families of this country for 45 years,” Sanders said.

Steyer, however, didn’t punch back.

“Senator Sanders is right. There have been 40 years where corporations have bought this government and those 40 years have meant a 40-year attack on the rights of working people and specifically on organized labor,” Steyer said, calling the system “absolutely wrong. It's absolutely un-democratic and unfair. I was one of the first people on this stage to propose a wealth tax.”

Quipped Klobuchar: “No one on this stage wants to protect billionaires. Not even the billionaire wants to protect billionaires.”

Vet vs. Vet

The two U.S. veterans onstage, Gabbard and Buttigieg, hold radically different positions on whether President Trump was right to pull troops out of Syria, paving the way for the Turks to invade and begin slaughtering the Kurds, once U.S. allies who helped stop the terror group ISIS.

Gabbard, who has visited Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in his home country, blamed nearly everyone for the situation.

“The slaughter of the Kurds being done by Turkey is yet another negative consequence of the regime change war we've been waging in Syria. Donald Trump has the blood of the Kurds on his hand, but so do many of the politicians in our country from both parties who have supported this ongoing regime change war in Syria that started in 2011.”

Buttigieg struck back against Gabbard, saying her position is “dead wrong” because the current crisis was due to Trump’s withdrawal, which greenlighted the Turkish invasion.

“The slaughter going on in Syria is not a consequence of American presence, it a consequence of a withdrawal and a betrayal by this president of American allies and American values,” Buttigieg said.

“When I was deployed, I knew one of the things keeping me safe was the flag on my shoulder represented a country that kept its word. You take that away, it takes away what makes America and America and makes the troops,” he said, “Well, respectfully, congresswoman, I think that is dead wrong. The slaughter going on in Syria is not a consequence of American presence, it is a consequence of a withdrawal and a betrayal by this president of American allies and American values.”

Gabbard: “So what you're saying, Mayor Pete, you would continue to have U.S. Troops in Syria for an indefinite period of time to continue this regime change war that has caused so many refugees to flee Syria, that you would continue to have our country involved in a war that has undermined our national security, you would continue this policy of the U.S. --actually providing arms in support to terrorist groups in Syria like Al Qaeda and Al Nusra because they have been the ground force in this regime change war?”

Said Buttigieg: “You can put an end to endless war without embracing Donald Trump's policy, as you're doing.”

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Read More