Like the moon this week, I find that my interest in these debates is waning.  Thus I decided to liven things up this time a tad by playing Candidate Bingo.  I made myself up a little card with all the clichés I expected to hear and that was my bingo card.  That I had nobody to play with didn’t stop me, nor did the fact that I couldn’t (quite) think of enough clichés to make two cards.  I simply settled on twenty-four clichés and wrote them down.  I also handicapped myself a bit by attributing each cliché to a particular candidate.  Thus, when Tulsi Gabbard was the first to bring up her combat veteran status instead of my pick of Pete Buttigieg, I blocked myself.  And off they went.

My first, easy pickup was Joseph Biden saying “Here’s the thing”.  Andrew Yang ,mentioning his autistic son?  Check.  “A political revolution” from Bernie Sanders?   Her father and grandfather from Amy Klobuchar?  Check and check.  I got a little nervous with Elizabeth Warren and “I’ve got a plan for that!”, especially when Biden started the evening by mocking it (”We need a doer, not a planner”) but she did say it later, albeit rather wanly.  But I finally lost, again thanks to Gabbard, and again I blame Buttigieg, when she beat him to some God-talk.  So there I sat, disconsolately, one of life’s losers, a Baltimore Orioles of Candidate Bingo, left to sort it all out.

The punditry had estimated that the fringe contenders would gang up on Warren tonight instead of Lunchpail Joe, and they were right.  Biden finally got to do what he  seems to want to do, which is to get to dinner without having to say anything, for most of the night, while Buttigieg led the pack of secondary candidates demanding to hear how Warren was going to pay for this and that.  And although I was glad to hear Gabbard become the first candidate for much of anything, let alone the presidency, say something about Syria with which I agreed (“We need to end regime change wars”) that I almost forgave her for ending my Candidate Bingo game, I doubt that she, or any other of the secondary candidates, helped themselves very much; if anybody besides maybe Rand Paul, agreed with me about Syria, some of the candidates would be pitching in on it, right?

Withal, I wish said punditry would point to some poll evidence to back up their assertion that Warren is on some sort of roll.  As far as I can remember, she’s been one point behind Sanders in the polls for at least six months, the both of them six or eight points behind Biden, and there she sits today.  In fact, the only candidate I’ve seen moving up in the polls (besides Biden, who actually went up two points in the wake of the debate, a sort of Zen America reaction to his relative silence on the evening, I suppose) is Yang, who elbowed Klobuchar and Castro down to the edge of the stage along with returnee Gabbard and new boy Tom Steyer, whose initiation was to be ignored by the moderators even more than was Biden.

I haven’t heard of any more debates this year, though CNN has been talking off and on about a town hall on LGBTQ issues for later this month, but since there’s not much ‘later’ left in the month, I doubt that it’s going to come off.  So I decided to let some pundits tell me where we stand some eighty or ninety days before Iowa and New Hampshire weigh in.

I actually got to stop after one pundit, though.  Said pundit was a high muckity-muck in Iowa who said that to be viable, a candidate had to finish in the top five in Iowa and that nobody cared about New Hampshire any more (yes, I know, she would say that, wouldn’t she?).  And she went on to say that she was being generous in saying ‘five’, it probably really was going to come down to three.  That made sense to me, so off I went to play FreeCell.  And I suppose that those three will be Biden, Sanders, and Warren, all doubling or tripling anybody else’s poll numbers.  Expand it out to five, and from national polls you add Kamala Harris and Buttigieg, though, probably because she’s from an adjoining state and thus is polling above her national 2%, Klobuchar might displace one or the other of them.

Yes, Iowans do surprise at times; in fact, their love for one Jimmy Carter in 1976 was in large measure responsible for their elevated status in the first place.But by and large, they’ve been little surprises, mostly on the Republican side, and in favor of candidates who basically flamed out pretty quickly (e.g., Mike Huckabee, Richard Gephardt).In short, I think we’ve winnowed.