AMBER PHILLIPS, WASHINGTON POST
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders squared off in the fifth Democratic presidential debate in New Hampshire on Thursday night. I watched, and picked some of the best and worst of the night.
Winners
Hillary Clinton: This was not a debate in which Clinton scored a knockout blow. It was one, however, that she won on points. Clinton came out super aggressive in the debate's first 30 minutes, pushing Sanders back on his heels on, well, everything: Guns, experience, the tenor of the campaign, what it means to be progressive and plenty of other things.
There are those who will see Clinton's tone in those first 30 minutes as over the top and, therefore, ineffective, but it seemed to me that she set up lots and lots of attacks that she can follow through on beyond New Hampshire. (Clinton made clear — at least to my eyes — that she understands the New Hampshire primary is a lost cause. )
When the subject moved to foreign policy in the debate's second hour, Clinton was clearly more at ease than Sanders and effectively made the case that now isn't the time to put someone in the Oval Office who needs to learn on the job.
It was far from a perfect debate for Clinton. She struggled, again, to explain the speaking fees she took as a private citizen and pointedly refused the opportunity to release the transcripts of those speeches. Her response (or lack thereof) ensures the issue will linger.
Two-person debates: There's a reason that networks try to limit the number of people on stage during these debates. This debate — the first one on one showdown of the 2016 primary season — proved that less is more in debates. The first hour was the best hour of any debate of this election: substantive, confrontational and entertaining. Both candidates had plenty of time to make their cases to voters and, more importantly, voters had a chance to get a deep look at what these two people believe and where they differ.
Losers.
* Bernie Sanders: I hesitate to put the Vermont socialist in the "loser" category because he did very little in the debate that will slow his momentum heading into a near-certain New Hampshire win. But, I also hate when analysts and reporters take the easy way out when picking winners and losers. It was a two-person debate; if Clinton won then Sanders, by definition, didn't win. (This is the problem with using the binary choice of "winner" and "loser" to grade debates. But, I digress.)
I thought Sanders was forceful and effective, as always, when talking about economic inequality and campaign finance reform. I thought he may have allowed himself to be put in a box as a single or double issue candidate down the line by Clinton, however.
Sanders also continued to struggle when the debate moved off of domestic issues and onto matters of foreign policy. On a question about what the right next steps were regarding American troops in Afghanistan, Sanders's answer was rambling and generally non-sensical.
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Sanders knows what to say; he knows how to connect emotionally. On Flint, he was done with his answer, and then it occurred to him, but let me just add—Flint is a poor black city, and it never would have been treated this way if it were a middle-class white city. Applause! Clinton is less good at that. She aims for the head. He aims for the heart. That’s their DNA. Heart almost always wins.
But here’s Clinton’s possible opening. Sanders’s foreign policy problems were real. He had no chops beyond saying I voted against Iraq. So Clinton can get at him on that. But: She should not make it a foreign policy argument explicitly. If she goes out there Friday and says “Senator Sanders isn’t prepared to deal with our complex world,” it’ll fall flat, because most Democratic primary voters don’t care about our complex world one-tenth as much as they care about evil banks and Wall Street.
...So she needs to disguise her foreign policy argument (because most people feel kind of intimidated about foreign policy) as a ready-to-be-president argument. Because ready-to-be-president is code for Sanders’s lack of knowledge about foreign policy, but other things as well: the fact that he hasn’t ever had to take on the right in the way she has, the fact that he’s never been through the media grist mill in the way she has, and so on. It’s not an electability argument. It’s different. It’s about who can handle the job. Foreign policy is the avenue into it.