Flash! Hillary is a capitalist!
While the debate was mostly a love fest, there were a few points of sharp disagreement, especially between polished Clinton and passionate Sanders
We saw the woman (did she mention she's a woman?) the Hillarites love during the Democratic debate.
Standing in the middle (the Donald Trump lectern position), Hillary Clinton 3.2 was relaxed, informed, seemingly "authentic" and "human," the qualities her campaign recently said would be unveiled. Is it real or artifice? It doesn't matter. She was more natural than on her recent Saturday Night Live appearance.
This was a gaff-free Hillary, not the one her campaign likes to rope off from reporters. She used "values" and "experience" as touch stones.
Flash: The multi-millionaire candidate is also a "capitalist," although she didn't utter that word. She deftly redefined "capitalist" from Bernie Sanders' Wall Street and corporations to the small businesses that built the middle class.
Main challenger Brooklyn Bernie, who is screamingly authentic, handed her the huge gift of dismissing her email problems as a distraction. That got applause from the partisan crowd, and when Hillary laughed it wasn't the Madame Tussaud wax dummy laugh, it was, well, authentic.
Lincoln Chafee needs to be voted off the island. He talked of himself as being ethical and honest, which was a subtle dig at the frontrunner. He has abandoned his signature issue, converting the U.S.A. to the metric system because we'd rather convert to veganism, which is equally difficult to accomplish.
The cartoonish Chafee killed himself when he said he voted for Glass-Steagall (never mind) Act because (choose one) he was newly appointed, he was new on the job and his father was dying. An astonished Anderson Cooper (who had crafted good questions and had the background for follow-ups) asked Chafee if he didn't know what he was voting for.
Chafee complained he was being picked on. He should have answered "yes."
There was only one one-word answer in the debate, and that was the "no" given by Hillary when Cooper asked if she wanted to respond to criticism from Chafee about her credibility. That ended that.
Former Republican Jim Webb, who seemed embalmed, was the resident right-wing loon, at least as contrasted with the other four, not being "anti-gun," for instance. He diminished himself by complaining about not getting enough time. As a former Marine he should have just charged the hill.
There's something about Martin O'Malley that strikes me as too self-satisfied. I can't put my finger on it, maybe because he thinks illegal immigrants should get Obamacare subsidies. I like his idea of having America on a green electric grid by 2050 – 35 years is enough to get that done, and we should.
Bernie Sanders came off as angry because he is angry.
Lost in the chatter was his suggestion to lift the ceiling on taxable income, which would make Social Security solvent and something I've pushed for years.
A quick aside to praise Anderson Cooper. His questions were pointed and when the candidate began to dodge and weave, he had the supporting evidence at hand. I sense he did this himself, these were not questions handed to him by a producer.
But CNN promoted the debate like Friday Night Fights and the opening was like the intro to Monday Night Football with the announcer talking about "an election season that's broken all the rules." Less hype, CNN. The 15 million viewers was about 10 million less than the Republican debate, which (to be fair) had three times the number of candidates, one of them being Supreme Showman/Loose Cannon Donald Trump.
There were bright points of difference among the candidates.
The biggest national security threat was defined as chaos in the Mideast (Chafee), a nuclear Iran (O'Malley), spread of nukes (Clinton), climate change (Sanders) and China (Webb).
How their victory would not be an "Obama third term"
"Stop these wars" (Chafee), protect the recovery from mercenary banks (O'Malley), build on its success (Clinton), curb corporate power (Sanders), revenue won't expand under current policy (Webb).
In some of the above cases, I had to boil down a lot of gaseous comment to distill what they might have meant.