A Biden by their decision? Democrats debate

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The killing of Iran's military commander, Qassem Soleimani, seemed to foster national unity, but that tide swiftly turned following Iran's accidental downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane. We ask what the widespread protests mean for the regime's future. And public transport in Colombia's capital requires quite a bit of patience. We take a look at how Bogotá's once adored cheap alternative to a metro system went so wrong. First up, though, Tonight, Democratic candidates will take to the stage for their 7th debate. Unlike previous contests, which had up to 20 candidates facing off, tonight's will feature only 6. The debate comes as primary season is about to get underway.

At long last, people are about to start voting.

John Fassmann is our Washington correspondent.

Iowa caucuses on February 3rd, and then after that you have a contest every week for the next 2 months. You have Iowa, followed by New Hampshire, followed by Nevada, followed by South Carolina, followed by 16 states and territories voting on Super Tuesday. So we are really getting to the point where we're going to stop paying attention to polls and start paying attention to results.

The crowded field of candidates is thinning. Yesterday, Senator Cory Booker was the latest to drop out of the race. But some things haven't changed.

At this moment, the primary race looks a lot like it did one year ago in one sense, and that is that Joe Biden is on top of the field with about 30%, about 9 points ahead of Bernie Sanders. That's exactly where he was in January 2019. But there has been a lot of motion sort of underneath Biden, people coming, rising and falling. Bernie Sanders seems to be peaking at exactly the right moment. There is a poll that just came out from the Des Moines Register that had him leading the field, although given the margin of error, the candidates are more or less tied. But he's right there in the mix, and that could be good for him if he is peaking right when people begin voting.

I mean, if the top of the pack hasn't shifted much over that time, do you expect that it still could, or is this starting to solidify to your mind?

Well, that's the million-dollar question, right? Because the theory of political insiders the whole race has been that Biden is on top by virtue of name recognition and his support is soft and he's going to crater any moment now. But he hasn't cratered. I mean, he has always been a fairly unimpressive and undisciplined candidate, and he still is fairly unimpressive and undisciplined on the trail. But people really like him, and it seems as though his message, which is not big structural change, which is not we need a political revolution, but which is that this is a great country and we need to get back to normal for a little bit, really has a lot of purchase. It seems like people really like that. And so he has not done what people have expected him to do, which is falter and fail. His support seems quite solid.

So you say the best time for a surge is when voting begins. I mean, what should we be looking out for?

Well, you should be looking out for who gathers momentum, because that matters, right? If you remember back in 2008, Barack Obama was Trump was not ahead in national polls during the primary, but then he won Iowa, and I think that convinced people that he was a legitimate candidate, and so he attracted a surge of support there. Polls are a snapshot of the electorate at a specific moment. Once voting starts, the race becomes dynamic, so each victory or loss affects the next race. So instead of a snapshot of an electorate frozen in time, you have an electorate that's responding to what has just happened. That's why if one candidate has a surge or outperforms expectations, then that positively affects that candidate's chances, people think, in the next state.

But the field is still fairly crowded in terms of the number of names. And I noticed that you haven't named a lot of them. Do you think that those kinds of surges could really sort of change the leaderboard here when that voting starts?

The field is still quite large. It will get thinner as people start to underperform and not see a way to get to a delegate count that they like. The most interesting candidate to my mind, currently lingering in single digits, is Mike Bloomberg. Because he has structured his campaign in an unusual way, right? He is not competing in the early voting states, but he's spending a ton of money on ads nationally, and he's really banking on a strong showing on Super Tuesday, which is when 16 states and territories will vote. And there hasn't been as much attention paid to those states yet. So if you see a split in those 4 early voting states and then Bloomberg outperforms on Super Tuesday, you could see him rise to or near the top of the pack.

Well, although you say Mr. Biden's lead has been fairly clear-cut for really some time, there was a brief period when it seemed that Elizabeth Warren might knock him off off the top post. What's happened since then?

I think a couple of things happened with Warren. Number one, she had positioned herself as a candidate who had a well-thought-out plan for everything. And she had very wisely avoided releasing a specific plan for healthcare because it's extremely difficult. She didn't want to get tied down. But she eventually sort of took the bait and released her Medicare for All plan, which was enormously expensive and which she refused to say she would not raise taxes to achieve. Now Bernie Sanders has a Medicare for All plan, and he has a very simple answer to this tax question, which is that your taxes will go up less than your healthcare spend will go down. Elizabeth Warren didn't do that. And so I think the release of that plan made her do a bit of backpedaling she wouldn't have done otherwise, and it dented her image as someone who had a well-thought-out plan for everything. It's also the case Bernie is running a campaign entirely focused on working-class America. Elizabeth Warren also has an appeal to technocrats. She does much better with college-educated voters than Bernie does. And so she has tried to keep a sort of foot in both camps, not so much the progressive centrist camp, but a progressive technocrat camp. And this cycle has been really unkind to voters who try to straddle battle two camps. Beto O'Rourke tried, Kamala Harris tried, Kirsten Gillibrand tried. They're all out of the race.

And what about the divide then between the progressives and the centrists? Is the shape of that changing as the campaigning goes on?

No, that's really quite stark. The share of voters who support Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders combined, the progressive candidates, is about the same as the share of candidates who support Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and Mike Bloomberg, who are sort of the centrist candidates. So that split is stark, and it divides the party almost entirely in two, with about 25 to 30% of voters in the middle. And so I think I think for the Democrats to retake the White House, they're going to have to figure out a way to solve that split productively and without the sort of lingering vitriol that you saw in 2016.

But none of this is happening in a vacuum, right? Where we're in the middle of repercussions from the military action in Iran. How do you think that will affect the leaderboard?

One interesting thing I think about the candidates' foreign policies is that there isn't a huge amount of disagreement among them, as far as I can tell. And there also doesn't seem to be a huge amount on several key areas between them and the president. Nobody really has an appetite for a continued military presence in the Middle East. And so I think in the debate tonight, you'll see foreign policy have a prominence that it has not yet had. And I think that could redound to Joe Biden's advantage, just because he has had so much time on the world stage and other candidates have not.

So based on everything that you've seen so far, what sort of tactical advice would you give to someone who wants to be the front runner?

I suppose if I were to give any tactical advice to all the candidates, and it's the same for everyone, it's to try to end on a note of optimism. The striking thing about the race so far, I think one reason why Biden is ahead, is that Sanders and Warren both have fundamentally pessimistic messages.

I often have a hard time determining which group of people are the worst crooks in Washington. Is it Wall Street or is it the pharmaceutical industry? It is a tough one. I'm not quite sure.

The system is rigged. We need a revolution. It's time for big structural change. But the last 3 Democrats who have won have all been sort of vague and optimistic. Optimistic in their belief in this country, but vague in specific policy proposals. Barack Obama talked about hope, and everyone likes hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, There has never been anything false about hope.

And Bill Clinton talked about hope and bring hope back to the American dream. And Jimmy Carter presented himself as sort of morally upright and ethical, and everybody likes that.

An America that lives up to the majesty of its Constitution and the simple decency of its people.

And so I suppose if I were going to advise the candidates, I would tell them to pound an upbeat message these last 3 weeks because optimism really works better than specific policy proposals.

Look on the bright side.

The bright and somewhat dim side.

John, very nice to be with you.

Great to be here.

It took 3 days for Iran to admit that a Ukrainian International Airlines jet had been shot down by the Revolutionary Guard. The country's armed forces. Since then, outraged Iranians have taken to the streets. All 176 people on the flight were killed, including many Iranians. In the capital Tehran, demonstrators chanted "Death to the dictator." Police have reportedly shot at the crowds with live ammunition. The protests contrast with the public display of unity following the killing of General Qassem Soleimani by an American drone, after which hundreds of thousands of Iranians openly mourned. The anti-government demonstrations are proving a further test to a regime already under extreme pressure from the American sanctions that are choking the economy.

So over the past few days, we've seen thousands of Iranians take part in anti-government protests in cities across the country.

Roger McShane is our Middle East editor.

And this came after officials admitted that they had mistakenly shot down a civilian airliner last week. It's mainly middle-class Iranians, a lot of students. And it wasn't just the sort of tragic mistake of shooting down the airliner that upset them. It was the fact that the government had at first tried to cover up the incident, had lied about it for 3 days. But after other countries presented evidence contradicting their story, officials finally admitted that they had fired a surface-to-air missile that struck the plane.

I mean, there seemed to be a sort of united national mood just after the killing of General Soleimani, and that seemed to turn on a dime, really. Why do you think that was such a fragile sort of joining of efforts?

Yeah, so, I mean, I don't want to overstate this sort of amount of national unity in response to the killing of Qassem Soleimani, but there was this sort of, at least sort of surface-level, nationalism, and hundreds of thousands of people did come out to mourn the general. But I think resentment towards the government had been building for other reasons for a long time. And the missile strike that hit the civilian airliner and then the cover-up, the attempted cover-up of that incident, I think it just reminded people sort of how incompetent and seemingly incapable this government is in answering their grievances.

And what's your take on the degree to which these protests are a real threat to the regime?

So, you know, that's always the most difficult question to answer. And at the risk of sounding like the CIA in 1979, I don't think you're seeing a revolutionary situation here. I mean, Iran is a big, diverse country. And as much as you're seeing thousands of people in the streets, there's also large parts of the population that are still loyal to the regime. Having said all that, this type of resentment towards the government has been building up for years. America's economic sanctions on Iran have caused real pain, and the public's anger over the situation is often directed at the government in Iran. At the end of last year, for example, we saw big anti-regime protests over the economy. Those protests involved working-class Iranians. These, more students and middle-class Iranians. But over the past 2 years, you've seen nearly every segment of the society take to the streets at one time or another. It seems like the Supreme Leader has never been less popular. And if you sort of listen to the demonstrators now, there is this sense of excitement. There is this feeling that there is change in the air.

And so how has the regime reacted to that sense of change?

So it's reacted in two ways, and the first was actually quite unusual inasmuch as it apologized and it showed an amazing amount of self-criticism. The commander of the Revolutionary Guards, which was responsible for shooting down the plane, he issued a very rare and even emotional public apology.

[FOREIGN LANGUAGE] And then pleaded with the country to return to that feeling of nationalism.

The president called it a disastrous mistake. Even hardline newspapers criticized the regime for trying to cover up the incident. But there was also another side to all this. I mean, in other ways it felt like the government was trying to grab control of the mood, trying to sort of co-opt the grief. In Tehran, for example, you saw the government take down a billboard that showed a photo of General Soleimani, replace it with a black banner that showed the names of the crash victims. And you see that every time you see officials sort of apologize in public, they also try and steer the mood, steer the attention back towards America, blame it for the region's problems. And while all this is going on, the government is still going out into the streets, still shooting at crowds of protesters. It's unleashed its besieged militias into public squares to try and keep demonstrators from coming out. So you see them sort of reverting to the same old tactics they've used in the past to try and crush dissent.

Well, yeah, there seems to be a conflict there between the penitent and the aggressive. I mean, either way, is that going to work? Do you think that what the regime is doing will calm these protests?

I mean, for the time being, it might calm the protests, but you have underlying problems in Iran that aren't going away. I mean, namely the economy. I mean, this— the regime is not going to be stable so long as the economy is in turmoil, and the economy is going to be in turmoil so long as America continues to cut it off from the the global economy with these crushing sanctions. You have inflation running at over 40%. The price of food and other basic goods is rising. Youth unemployment is over 25%. And these problems aren't going away, and they're actually going to get worse unless you get a new nuclear deal, which seems rather unlikely at this stage, or a new president in America.

And in all of this, it seems that the Revolutionary Guard who were responsible for shooting down the plane are under tremendous scrutiny. I mean, how are their fortunes developing.

Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, within the regime, the Revolutionary Guard had seemed to be ascendant in relation to the clerics, in relation to the more pragmatic government before this incident. General Soleimani was all but in charge of Iranian foreign policy. The Guards have control over much of the economy. They seem to be the real power behind the throne, but they've now been thrust into the spotlight and it seems like they've been put on the back foot. You know, they've been shown to be not nearly as capable as they portrayed themselves. And it's really, it's a rare moment of scrutiny, as you said. But instability can also work in their favor. More power accrues to them in times of upheaval. The less popular the clerics become, the more they really assert themselves. You know, regime change in Iran, were it to happen, may not lead to the type of vibrant democracy that many hope for. It seems just as likely, perhaps more likely, to lead to regime led by the Revolutionary Guard. But in the short term, I think what you're going to see is sort of what the Revolutionary Guard is telling you you're going to see, which is a couple of things. You know, they're going to try and push America out of the region, as they keep saying. And that begins with Iraq. And then, you know, I think their sort of thirst for retaliation hasn't been slaked yet. You'll see that as a leader of their Revolutionary Guard was apologizing, he was also saying that the conflict with America isn't over. So, you know, what will they do? Well, I think they'll do a couple of things that they have a lot of experience with. They'll try and attack America indirectly, probably through proxies, and in a way that gives them plausible deniability and doesn't invite the same sort of retaliation from America that we've just seen.

Roger, thank you very much for joining us.

My pleasure.

Bogotá is a city of 8 million people, but the speed with which they get around the Colombian capital has been slowing.

Bogotá, unlike most major cities, doesn't have a metro system. Instead, it has a Transmilenio. That's a BRT system. That's short for bus rapid transit system.

Mariana Palau writes for The Economist and is based in Bogotá.

They do work similarly to a metro in the sense that they have dedicated stations and people, they pay their fare before they get into the stations. And once inside the stations, they wait for their buses and those buses run through dedicated bus lanes. And what that What that does is it helps avoid traffic, which can get really, really bad in Bogotá. Transmilenio is really under strain. Riders, they usually queue up for about 40 minutes to an hour to get into the station. And then once they are in the stations, they have to wait some more because the buses are so packed with people, they can't really board them. And then once you're in, well, you're pretty much very, very squeezed in between hundreds of people in these buses.

Users are really, really upset. They don't like the experience of riding these buses.

It sounds like an experience that requires, at the very least, a lot of patience, if not also time. I mean, has it always been this way?

So at first, the Transmilenio really was a triumph. It was opened in 2000. It cut commuting times from an average 90 minutes to 70. And the system's buses, they run just as fast as New York's Metro subway, and they carry 2.4 million passengers a day. That's today, but that's more than most European metros.

So it was a triumph, but it's now a real pain. What happened?

Well, to make a long story short, recent mayors just invested too little on it. So there was Gustavo Petro, and Petro is Colombia's most prominent left-wing politician. To please commuters, he cut TransMilenio's fares by about 20%, and over 3 years, that cost the city about $180 million. So that's when users started to see broken turnstiles, jammed bus doors, very, very dirty bus stations. And then Mr. Petro also, he didn't renew the bus fleet. So today, those buses break down because they're so old.

I mean, it sounds as if the problem is that the entire system just needs more capacity. I mean, is the idea idea of adding a metro line to the Transmilenio just completely off the table?

So Peñalosa, who built the first phases of the Transmilenio in the first place, he was elected mayor again in 2016.

He actually was able to award a contract to begin the construction of a metro that will be a 24-kilometer overground metro line, and it is due to open in 2026. The issue is that Mr. Peñalosa, along with the metro, also planned three more BRT lines and they would connect, they would feed the metro. Bogotanos were actually quite enraged about this because the Transmilenio is so unpopular. And they elected Claudia López. She's a Green Party candidate, or she was a Green Party candidate, and they elected her as mayor, partly because she opposed the expansion of the BRT system. She was very vocal against Transmilenio during her campaign, and she has insisted instead that she is going to build more metro lines, right?

It sounds as if Bogotanos do their mayoral elections solely on the basis of public transport issues. I mean, how is Miss López coming along with her plan anyway?

Yeah, public transportation is definitely a big issue in Bogotá, but Miss López took over as mayor on January 1st, and she may be forced to change her mind about Transmilenio because it could cost up to about $1.5 billion to build a second overground metro line. And that's money that the city just doesn't have. And commuters don't have it either, right? Because it will cost about 15,000 pesos to pay for the construction of this metro. That's about 2% of a monthly minimum wage here in Colombia. So Ms. López might have to look for cheaper alternatives. And as we've seen, Transmilenio is one of those cheaper alternatives. She is already said to be reconsidering her opposition to a BRT lane, one of Mr. Peñalosa's proposals. On Calle 68 at 68th Street, and that would link western working-class suburbs to the city center. That could help congestion in the Transmilenio system right now. More importantly, it would allow a lot of people to have access to public transportation. And she has also talked about fixing turnstiles and the jammed doors on the buses, but she really is going to have to consider expanding the Transmilenio's infrastructure if she she really, really wants to relieve commuters' misery.

Well, for the sake of your commuting, I hope that she does. Yes, so do I. Mariana, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you so much, Jason.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, and you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/radiooffer. 12 issues for $12 or £12. See you back here tomorrow.