Rivals target Biden as Democrats' rifts emerge on age, race

Democratic divisions over race, age and ideology burst into public view in Thursday night's presidential debate, punctuated by a heated exchange between former Vice President Joe Biden and California Senator Kamala Harris.

It was one of several moments that left the 76-year-old Biden, who entered the night as his party's early front-runner, on the defensive as he works to convince voters he's still in touch with the modern Democratic Party and best-positioned to deny President Donald Trump a second term.

"I do not believe you are a racist," Harris said to Biden before criticizing his record of working with Democratic segregationist senators on non-race issues as "hurtful." Biden called Harris' criticism "a complete mischaracterization of my record." He declared, "I ran because of civil rights" and later accused the Trump administration of embracing racism.

The night marked an abrupt turning point in a Democratic primary in which candidates have largely tiptoed around each other, focusing instead on their shared desire to beat Trump. With millions of Americans peeking inside the Democrats' unruly 2020 season for the first time, the showdown revealed deep rifts eight months before primary voting begins.

The showdown featured four of the five strongest candidates according to early polls, at least. Those are Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, and Harris. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who debated Wednesday night, is the fifth.

There are so many candidates lining up to take on Trump that they do not all fit on one debate stage or even two. Twenty Democrats debated on national television this week in two waves of 10, while a handful more were left out altogether.

Trump, who was attending the Group of 20 summit in Japan, still found time to weigh in on the debate and jab his rivals, claiming it didn't go well for Biden or Sanders. Trump tweeted Friday that he heard it was "not a good day" for them.

The level of diversity on display on the debate stage was unprecedented for a major political party in the United States. The field features six women, two African Americans, one Asian American and two men under 40, one of them gay.

Harris is the only African American woman to qualify for the presidential debate stage and showed she could land a forceful attack on rivals.

Any of the three women featured Thursday night would be the first ever elected president. Yet in the early days of the campaign, two white septuagenarians are leading the polls: Biden and Sanders.

Buttigieg, a 37-year-old gay former military officer, is four decades younger than Sanders and Biden and has framed his candidacy as a call for generational change in his party.

He displayed a fluency on a range of policy issues and hit hard on efforts by Republican Trump to stifle the flow of illegal immigration at the Mexican border.

"For a party that associates itself with Christianity to say it is OK to suggest that God would smile on the division of families at the hands of federal agents, that God would condone putting children in cages," that party "has lost all claim to ever use religious language," he said.

The party's broader fight over ideology took a back seat at times to its racial and generational divisions, which also flared when the discussion turned to health care. Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist , slapped at his party's centrist candidates, vowing to fight for "real change." He raised his hand to indicate he would give up his private insurance coverage in favor of a government-financed plan.

Most of the candidates on stage, including Biden, didn't join him. While many candidates, including Biden, embrace at least some version of Sanders' "Medicare for All" proposal , the former vice president also defended the role of private insurance, praising its role in the aftermath of the car accident that killed his wife and daughter and left his sons injured decades ago.

Along with Medicare, Buttigieg defended private insurance, too, but he also said, "We can't just be relying on the tender mercies of the corporate system."