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ROCK HILL, S.C.—If this is the only good night that Martin O'Malley has during his thus far quixotic pursuit of the Democratic nomination, then, what the hell, everyone's entitled to at least one good night anyway.

"I think this was the launch," he said, as he eased on out of the spin room after Friday night's Democratic forum here at Winthrop University–a college heretofore primarily known only to punters in the annual NCAA tournament pools every March. As it turns out, the format was the real star. Each of the three remaining Democratic candidates got to sit down across from kindly Doc Maddow, who threw questions at them that they all (blessedly) had time to answer at length. Nobody felt compelled to complain about the moderator. Nobody argued about who had more time, and could they pleeeeeze respond to the noxious slander from the jamoke down at the end of the stage. There were no opening and closing statements. It was a simple conversation with the country. Arguments were allowed to unspool at a relaxed pace; O'Malley even dropped in a quote from Thomas Merton, a rather longshot reference here at the far eastern end of the Bible Belt. There should have been cocoa.

There even was a touch of fun. Kindly Doc Maddow asked each of them to look at old pictures of themselves and asked what that person would think of the person they'd become. And she broke up each segment by asking the candidates to pick a card on which were written some off-topic–and off-the-wall–questions. More about this later.

Not that there weren't opportunities to land punches. O'Malley pointedly went after Bernie Sanders as a Democrat-come-lately, a line of attack he's been using over the last week since an old interview from the last cycle emerged in which Sanders argued that someone should primary the president.

O'MALLEY: Well, I think that -- I think that when President Obama was running for reelection, I was glad to step up and work very hard for him, while Senator Sanders was trying to find someone to primary him.I am a Democrat. I'm a lifelong Democrat. I'm not a former independent. I'm not a former Republican. I believe in the party of Franklin Roosevelt, the party of John F. Kennedy. I believe that we're all in this together and we can make a better future. And that's why I'm running for our party's nomination. And I've never once rejected the nomination of the Democratic Party. Nor will I this time.

O'Malley seemed to have been waiting for this kind of opportunity. He was relaxed and funny. Allowed to unwind his generational pitch, he talked about how young voters believe that climate change is real, and about how they think traditional attitudes toward LGBT citizens are ridiculous relics of a bygone age. He defended his tenure as mayor of Baltimore more ably than he has done before. Asked during the goofball segment whether he would spend money on coast-to-coast high-speed rail, or on a mission to Mars, O'Malley said, "I reject the premise of your question. I think we can do both." He got a big hand. The man had some fun.

As for Sanders, who is O'Malley's real target at this point in the race, it seemed for a while that his intensity might be too hot for the format; all the candidates answered on screen in tight closeup. But, as he warmed to it, it humanized him perhaps more than anything else in the campaign has. He had great fun with the oddball segment in the middle, making underwear jokes and admitting that the biggest misconception was that he was "grumpy." But he really caught his stride when he was asked about voter-suppression tactics, and he connected it shrewdly to the phenomenon of people who vote against their own best interests and, more obliquely, to the misbegotten strategy of the national Democratic party under the barely perceptible leadership of Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

This is personal since I run for office. You know? Sometimes you lose, sometimes you win. It has never occurred to me as a candidate to figure out a way that I can deny the vote to people because they might vote against me. And, the people who that are political cowards. They're afraid of a fair election. We have a real crisis in this country, and we have got to pass legislation -- maybe even a constitutional amendment that says that everybody in America who is 18 years of age, or older, is registered to vote. End of discussion. And what republicans are doing is so un-American, it is so outrageous that it is literally beyond belief. They are political cowards, and if they can't face a free election, they should get another job… Let me quote from my fellow Vermonter, Howard Dean, the Democratic party, as radical as it may seem, should be a 50 state party. You can't give up on South Carolina, or Alabama, or Mississippi.

And, you gotta start somewhere, and get good candidates and win. And, the other thing here is, and I'm going to do this in this campaign. I'm going to go out and talk to white working class Americans and say, 'Why do you keep voting against your own best interest? Why are you voting to -- why are you voting for people who are going to deny you health care?' They're going to send your jobs to China. They're not going to raise the minimum wage, and we have got to make a major focus on getting white working class people back into the Democratic Party to say that your enemies, the people who you should be opposing are not gay people, they're not immigrants, they are the billionaire class whose greed is destroying America. Stand with us, let's take them on.

He was fervent, but not fiery, and he had to time to get from voter-suppression all the way to one of its most damaging consequences–the abandonment of struggling citizens by the party that is supposed to represent their interests. This was the kind of advantage that this format presented to candidates, and both O'Malley and Sanders grabbed it and ran.

That brings us to the putative frontrunner, the tallest stick in the mud of the evening. Hillary Rodham Clinton was perfectly adequate, but she approached the event like a campaign town hall. She got all of her points across, but she resolutely resisted the temptation to relax. She gave a long, muddled answer on the death penalty. Shorter HRC: Yes for Timothy McVeigh. No for unnamed inmates who didn't blow up federal buildings. When she wasn't drawing these fine distinctions, she was fobbing it off as a state issue despite the fact that the Supreme Court banned it, then allowed its reinstatement, and appears to be on the verge of banning it again.

(She also suggested that it might be applied to Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, which would be a complicated business since we can't even put him on trial, because we waterboarded him until he grew gills.)

The most revelatory moment, however, came in the middle of her segment, when kindly Doc Maddow brought out the goofy cards again. Asked which of the current Republican candidates she would pick if she were forced to pick one of them as her vice-presidential candidate, she refused to play. (This, as she noted, would have effectively ended the primary chances of whichever Republican she picked.) "People are going to say I dodged the question," HRC said. "That's because I dodged the question. Kindly Doc Maddow followed up by asking, "If I say the word 'hushpuppy,' do you think 'food,' 'shoe,' or 'dog.'?"

"The first two," replied HRC.

Jesus, to paraphrase the great John Riggins–loosen up, Hill, baby.

This is the way the debates should be, some of them anyway. The Republicans should demand one of their own, but they won't. It was calm and reasoned, and there was enough stuff to argue about to keep it from becoming unbearably fuzzy. There should have been cocoa. And I'm telling you, if this format had existed back in, say 2000, Joe Biden would be opening his library by now.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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