Concerned Citizen posted:

I just got back from Drake.

My thoughts: Not sure anyone really won. Hillary is getting roasted in the press over the 9/11 response. Some are calling it a gaffe - it wasn't. It was clearly a carefully crafted debate line that just misfired horribly. The point, that she got a lot Wall Street donations because of her work advocating for NYC reconstruction, was totally lost after invoking 9/11. By letting Bernie paint the entirety of Wall Street with a broad brush, she essentially conceded the premise. I got the point of why she said what she said - it was to simultaneously rebut the charge while highlighting her work after 9/11. To a campaign consultant, that might sound really clever. Instead, it just came off as reminiscent of Rudy Giuliani.

I thought Hillary made it through the foreign policy section despite having a target on her back, and she demonstrated that she just knows a whole lot more about it than her opponents. They hammered her on Iraq, although I suspect that this is largely already baked into the cake and it's going to be hard to score points on this as primary voters already know about it and have evidently chosen to ignore it. Bernie didn't do great here, and O'Malley sounded like he was moving to Hillary's right. The fact that the Dems on the stage were clearly so flustered by the "radical Islam" question was bizarre. They obviously were trying to be responsible, but the idea that you need to use some magic phrase to be tough against terrorism is inane and they should have said that.

Bernie let a number of things Hillary said slip by - I can't believe he let her get away with the clearly asinine "Donald Trump's kids" line on free college, and his reply to her on the Terry Branstad line re: singlepayer administration was not effective. I think that's just a lack of preparation - she's deployed these criticisms before, and he should have already known how to respond. He could have won some serious points on these, but he let them slide.

It's not clear to me that any candidate turned in a great performance. O'Malley might get a boost out of this by default, although I will note that he's actually the only candidate on the stage who is a horrible monster.