Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, Ohio's most read Black digital newspaper and Black blog. Tel: (216) 659-0473 and Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com

By Kathy Wray Coleman, editor-in-chief

CLEVELANDURBANNEWS.COM-WESTERVILLE, Ohio-Twelve 2020 Democratic presidential candidates debated Tuesday night at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, a Columbus suburb, Columbus the state capital and largest city in the state and Ohio a critical battleground state.

Participating in the Fourth Democratic Debate were front runners former vice president Joe Biden and U.S. Sens Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, U.S. Sens Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke, former secretary of HUD Julian Castro, billionaire Tom Steyer, and businessman Andrew Yang.

Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan, a Youngstown Democrat who  says he is running a grassroots campaign, did not qualified for the debate, the qualification criteria a combination of individual donors and standing in national polls.

Hosted by CNN and the New York Times the debate went on for more than two and a half hours with debate issues ranging from the pending impeachment inquiry in the House against President Donald Trump, to gun violence, abortion and women's rights, domestic and foreign policy, and the closing last year of the General Motors Lordstown plant and the  GM strike that is in its 5th week and impacts some 50,000 workers nationwide.

Also center stage were social security and medicare, opioids, jobs, universal childcare, the U.S. withdrawal from Syria, Russian President Valdamir Putin, and the Ukraine controversy that has put Trump in the hot seat, the impeachment inquiry centered around the president's alleged efforts to manipulate Ukraine leaders to dig up dirt on Biden and his son Hunter Biden.

Biden said that Trump petitioned Ukraine for help to undermine the presidential election because he "knows that if I get the Democratic nomination I will beat him like a drum."

Biden said Trump is corrupt, a posture taken by practically all of the candidates at Tuesday's debate,  and that he is ignorant, at best, on foreign policy matters.

The former U.S. senator, who was vice president under Barack Obama, the nation's first Black president, said he is the only candidate to have done anything substantive in terms of national public policy and highlighted the Violence Against Women Act and the Affordable Care Act, which he says needs a public option rather than the medicare- for-all proposals pushed by Warren and Sanders, Warren some three points behind Biden in the polls at 26 to 23 percent.

Sanders admitted his medicare-for-all plan will increase taxes while Warren, though hounded at least three of the candidates due to her front runner status, said the rich will bear the burden of the costs and that her plan offsets cost for the middle class, her opponents demanding she come clean and admit that her plan will increase taxes.

Warren is the only candidate to last night advocate for more federal funding for historically Black colleges and universities.

And the federal lawmaker said she supports universal childcare and universal health care.

Sen Harris said gun violence is the leading cause of death for young Black men, that Trump is a criminal who obstructed justice, and that  interfering with a women's' right to choose is absurd, Ohio in the spotlight like several other states relative to a six-week abortion ban passed by the Republican-dominated Ohio state legislature, legislation that has not yet taken effect as abortion rights advocates, led by the Ohio ACLU and the League of Women Voter, fight it out in the courts.

"Women are the majority of the population in this country," said Harris, a former California attorney general. "People need to keep their hands off of women's bodies and let women make decisions about their own lives."

Both Harris and Sen Booker, the only Blacks in the race for president, advocated for Black people during the debate, Booker, a former Newark mayor, telling CNN after the debate that the opioids epidemic, a subject of the debate, is getting more attention than the crack epidemic in the Black community because of racism, and elitism.

In 2017 alone, Ohio had the second highest rate of drug overdose deaths from opioids in the U.S.

Harris and Sanders said the pharmaceutical companies that make billions of dollars selling opioids they know are addictive should be prosecuted, and Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio and secretary of HUD under Obama, agreed.

Castro, 45, said that the pivotal states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan have lost jobs under Trump, Politifact rebutting him after the debate in an online Internet posting and saying that all three states saw small job gains since the president took office.

All of the candidates polled said they support the GM workers on strike, and the  impeachment of President Trump.

On taxes, the billionaire Steyer, in his first debate of the fourth Democratic debates thus far, said that if he becomes president he will slash Trump's tax plans that benefit the rich and disenfranchise the middle class and working poor, all of the candidates of whom say the president's tax policy agendas are for big business and his rich friends.

Sanders said that members of Republican-dominated U.S. Senate, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky,  must follow the lead of Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats on impeachment, the Dems winning control of the House in the 2018 midterm elections.

Asked about his health following a recent heart attack, Sen. Sanders said he is in good health and would prove it at a future rally, sources saying that U.S. Reps Ilhan Omar, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib intend to join him at such rally for an endorsement.

On gun violence O'Rourke pushed his mandatory gun buyback proposal, which moderate candidates Sen Klobuchar and Mayor Buttigieg, the only openly gay candidates, opposed, the articulate Buttigeig on the attack as the 5th Democratic Primary Debate, which is set for Nov. 20 in Atlanta Georgia, nears.

Biden said he is the only candidate that has effectively taken on the gun-toting National Rifle Association on gun control.

Ohio is in the spotlight following a mass shooting by a gunman that killed nine in the city of Dayton, which occurred a week after a mass shooting that killed 22 people and injured 24 others in El Paso, Texas.

Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper and Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez, former secretary of labor under Obama, spoke before the debaters took to the stage, Pepper saying "we [Ohio] will be the state that ends the Trump presidency."

No Democrat has won the White House without first winning Ohio and no Republican of remembrance has done so either.

There have been only two candidates since 1896 to lose Ohio and win the presidency.

President Trump carried Ohio in 2016 when he defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Only Warren, Sanders, Buttigieg and front-runner Biden are polling in double digits nationally, the other eight candidates on stage polling at five percent or less nationwide.