Most Candidates Are Running for President. Joe Biden Is Still Strolling.
MIAMI—By the time the Democratic candidates began to deliver their closing statements at last night’s debate, most of the roughly 375 reporters in the spin room were already out of their chairs, getting in position to grab interviews with the competitors and their teams.
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper popped in first, followed almost immediately by one of his home state’s senators, Michael Bennet, and then Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. Roving clumps of reporters shouted questions at the candidates as they made their way from cable-news camera to cable-news camera. Think Frogger, the 1980s arcade game, if the frog had microphones shoved in its face while it tried to hop between lily pads.
The spin room is a strange post-presidential-debate tradition, where campaign staffers and surrogates try to tell the press what to think about an event reporters just watched with their own eyes. Only this time, for the first set of Democratic debates, there was a twist: The
