CNN's Democratic Debate went from bad questions on Night 1 to bad follow-ups on Night 2

Slate

Night 1 was devoted to aggressively questioning Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, the two most prominent progressives in the field. "While I understand the impulse to use the debates as an opportunity to hold candidates’ feet to the fire on their policies and public statements, the questions seemed mostly designed to get Warren and Sanders to admit that they are not, in fact, centrists," says Justin Peters. He adds that for Night 2, "someone at CNN apparently decided the moderators should step back and let the candidates tear each other up instead. And so on Wednesday, (Dana) Bash, (Don) Lemon, and (Jake) Tapper mostly let the candidates engage with each other, intervening only to call time or bring other voices into the fray. This minimalistic approach worked well during the health-care section of the debate, in part because it exposed how uncomfortable both (Joe) Biden and (Kamala) Harris are when being challenged on this topic. That’s valuable information for Democratic voters as they try to envision the general election. By the end of the second hour, however, CNN had reached the limits of the 'your response?' strategy. It turns out that 'Candidate X, another candidate says this thing, what do you think?' is not a productive mode of questioning. At times it felt like the moderators had primarily researched what the candidates had said about each other’s policies, not what those policies actually said. The laziness showed."

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