Nobody expected a whole lot of excitement from the first Democratic debate, and it delivered.

The decorous Las Vegas session was a pillow fight compared with those laugh-riot Donald Trump Republican melees. The reason: None of the five Democrats, especially Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, were particularly inclined to savage each other, and there wasn’t much daylight between them on the issues even if they were in a more bellicose mood.


Clinton, a skilled and aggressive debater, was way more comfortable on the stage than during all those awful, forced-march email interviews and server-centric press conferences. But she had help. Her challengers, especially Sanders, were more intent on proving they belonged on the stage next to her than trying to knock her off of it.

If Joe Biden was waiting for signs of a Hillary Clinton collapse to coax him into the 2016 race, he should have shut off Tuesday’s debate and watched the baseball playoffs.

Here are seven takeaways:

1. Hillary awakens! Maybe it was stepping outside herself to become Val the Bartender on "SNL" that got the infamously tightly wound front-runner out of her own head — but the woman who won 18 million Democratic primary votes in ’08 finally looked like a winner for the first time this year. For all her happy talk of adoring peach-pie interactions with adoring rope-line supporters in Ames, Clinton has always run best for president in grander, more overtly presidential environments. Before Tuesday, her most impressive performance took place in front of an elite D.C. audience at Brookings when she defended the Iran deal last month. This was a bigger stage, one befitting her status, and she projected a waking-from-a-nightmare vibe, comfortable enough to take a few swings at Sanders in the forceful but smooth senatorial way she perfected in two dozen solid debate performances against Barack Obama.

Like a tourist from Brooklyn bragging about his own blackjack system, Sanders crowed about not overpreparing for Vegas — and was walloped by the house during the first hour: When the Vermont independent praised the health care systems of Denmark and Norway, Clinton sensed a Debate 101 opening. “I love Denmark,” she snarked. “We are not Denmark. We are the United States of America.”

Clinton may not get a bump in the polls, but she flat-out won the debate. Which raises the question: Why, oh why, did she lobby to limit the number of debates to six?

2. Bernie gave her a free pass. The indisputable signature moment of the debate came about halfway through when Sanders, in the unaffected style that has won him so many admirers, expressed what seemed to be a heartfelt sentiment that ran counter to his own interests. “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails,” Sanders declared, after Clinton tried (with limited success) to divert the inevitable email interrogation into an attack on the Republican-steered House Benghazi committee.

Clinton reacted to her gallows reprieve with undisguised relief. She smiled from ear to ear and grabbed Sanders’ hand — a cheerful reversal of Rick Lazio’s infamous attempt to invade her podium personal space during a 2000 Senate debate. “Thank you, Bernie,” she said to thunderous applause. Sanders might yet have the last laugh: Clinton may have dodged a grilling among her fellow Democrats — but he came off as a magnanimous mensch, not the old, scolding uncle many Clinton backers have painted him to be.

3. O’Malley was the odd man out. No serious candidate (with the exception of Scott Walker) has underperformed quite as dramatically as former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who is registering low single digits everywhere — including his home state. It wasn’t that he was bad on Tuesday night; he just slipped through the cracks, a liberal candidate trapped between an electrifying socialist and an increasingly progressive Clinton. The fact that the Democrats agree, in general terms, on virtually every policy area (there’s no comparable split, for instance, on immigration reform as there is in the GOP field) left O’Malley with precious little to differentiate himself from Clinton and Sanders. Add to that a bland delivery and lack of laugh lines — and there’s little reason to believe O’Malley revived his flagging candidacy.

4. A Trump-less debate is a smarter debate. Say what you want about the Democrats, they are a wonk pack. If you want two hours of personal combat with extended exchanges about The Donald’s hair, Carly Fiorina’s face, Rand Paul’s height or Jeb Bush’s testosterone levels, tune into the next GOP debate in a couple of weeks. If you had a hankering for the finer points of drug sentencing laws, the relative merits of Glass-Steagall vs. Dodd-Frank or the details of Clinton’s college tuition plan, this was the debate for you.

The civility of the discourse was also smart politics: Polls show that a vast majority of Democrats, even those who question her trustworthiness, are still broadly supportive of Clinton and are turned off by the kind of unrestricted verbal combat that has made the Republican scrums must-see TV.

5. Clinton did OK on emails — Wall Street, not so much. If Sanders was willing to give Clinton a pass on her scandals, he laser-focused on the issue at the core of his appeal to anti-establishment Democrats: economic inequality and sundry abuses of the financial services industry. “Congress doesn't regulate Wall Street. Wall Street regulates Congress," Sanders said. "Saying ‘please do the right thing’ is kind of naive."

Sanders, allying himself with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, has called for the breakup of the biggest banks to avoid the unfair centralization of capital and another financial crisis; he’s been outspoken in opposing the appointment of Wall Street officials to the Treasury Department and regulatory agencies. Clinton has called for tighter regulation but doesn’t back the bank breakup — and she took substantial speaking fees from major Wall Street firms, including more than $600,000 from Goldman Sachs.

Compared with Sanders’ battle cry, Clinton’s rhetoric seemed tepid and reactive. "I represented Wall Street when I was a senator from New York," she said. "I went to Wall Street and said, 'Cut it out.'" Not exactly pitchforks.

6. Sanders can’t handle a gun. The Clinton campaign knew Sanders would out-Warren them on Wall Street — so they sprung a trap on the Brooklyn-bred Vermonter on guns, specifically his five votes in opposition to the Bill Clinton-backed Brady bill in the early 1990s when Sanders was a congressman. For once, Clinton had a force multiplier — Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, whose super PAC has already run anti-Sanders ads, criticizing the votes. The two squeezed Sanders, whose broader appeal rests on his honesty and authenticity, as he stammered and squirmed.

He seemed unprepared: He said something about representing a “rural state,” then called a recent vote against holding gun manufacturers liable for violence “large and complicated.”

Clinton scowled. “I was in the Senate at the same time,” she shot back. “It wasn’t that complicated to me.”

7. Chafee and Webb were subatomic. Nobody expected Lincoln Chafee, who somehow managed to register a single percentage point in recent polls, to make much noise. The sole exception was his explanation for voting against a key bank-regulation bill when serving in the Senate as a Republican from Rhode Island: He said he was too much of a newbie to know better — and was grieving over his father’s death at the time.

Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, a former Navy secretary known for his way with words, whined endlessly about not getting enough mic time — then proceeded to meander through the questions he was asked. His one memorable moment came when moderator Anderson Cooper asked the candidates which enemies they were most proud of making. Clinton nailed it by answering “the Iranians” and “Republicans.”

Webb, a glowering, muscle-bound presence at the end of the stage, responded with a chilling story about his tour in ‘Nam. “I’d have to say the enemy soldier that threw the grenade that wounded me, but he’s not around right now to talk,” he said to nervous laughter in the hall.