Friday night’s Iowa Wing Ding Dinner lacked the flash of the recent Fox News Republican debate, but that’s not the point. There’s actual meat at the Wing Ding – and not just chicken wings: candidates are expected to talk about policy as part of their appeals for more donations and to lend upper-card star power to an undercard of Democratic candidates for county and state-wide Iowa offices.

And, for outsiders, it’s a solid preview of the personalities of the Democratic primary, barring any more candidates: Lincoln Chafee is a nice man; Hillary Clinton is formidably polished; Bernie Sanders is righteously angry;and Martin O’Malley will probably siphon energy and ideas from all of them, standing like a tall, handsome, safely male candidate with a slightly affected southern twang.

Though he spoke last, let us, like Democratic voters, dispense with Chafee first. He is a former Republican Senator and Governor of Rhode Island who went apostate in the 2000s, the only Republican Senator to vote against Iraq War II, and he is pro-choice, pro-marriage equality, pro-gun control and pro-progressive taxation. All of that is pretty much what he told assembled Wing Dingers, informally referring back to notes on a card and going through his CV. “I distinguished myself with courageous votes time after time,” he said, before transitioning to an amusingly arch takedown of Jeb Bush’s Middle East policy, “What kind of neocon Kool-Aid is this man drinking?” and ending with aspirations for the Democratic Party as a whole that seemed to suggest that he knows he has no chance at winning but wants to put in legwork as a happy warrior for the cause.

Clinton, of course, set the high mark for polish– especially in terms of integrating her talking points so they sounded more conversational, which is notoriously difficult for Democrats who want to avoid sounding like a list of chores read out every morning by the camp counselors.

As has become standard, her remarks focused on women’s issues, starting with her mother’s struggles to make it on her own at 14 and the lessons she taught Clinton which are, in what’s no longer a surprising twist, both relevant to her campaign and the reason she’s running. From there, Clinton castigated the Republican war on women and Planned Parenthood, tied the entire Republican field to Donald Trump’s outrageous statements about women by saying that the rest were just like him only “without the pizzaz or the hair” and said “if calling for equal pay is playing the gender card, then deal me in.”

One of her jokes, though, is what actually made headlines on Saturday: “I recently got a Snapchat account. I love it. Those messages disappear all by themselves”, an allusion to her private email server from her time as Secretary of State, which she later proudly stated that she had turned over to the FBI. That latter detail unfortunately undermined some of the hilarity of the Snapchat zinger, since complying with a law enforcement directive about which you really have no choice isn’t really that funny.

But Clinton’s more substantive high point involved calling out the Republican party for its refusal to “end the era of mass incarceration and to say, loudly and clearly, yes, black lives matter.”

Her reference to Black Lives Matter is also important because, despite his own run-ins with the movement, the next speaker, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, didn’t pick it up and run with it. It’s immaterial where you stand on Sanders and Black Lives Matter: whether you believe that the best approach to racial inequality is ending income inequality or addressing racial inequities directly, the very least Sanders can do in the wake of campaign disruptions by racial justice advocates is to pay lip service to race issues. Paying lip service is what every other Democratic hack would do, so his refusal to utter the phrase “black lives matter” at every opportunity, while evidence of his estimable dislike of sloganeering, is also self-defeating. If he agrees with the slogan in principle, and if just saying it is a lightweight gesture, then making that effort ain’t all that heavy.

Sanders did mention Freddie Gray (killed by police in Baltimore) and Eric Garner (killed by police in New York City) and demanded that needless deaths like theirs must stop, while calling for an end to the militarization of police, the establishment of community policing and an end to mandatory minimums. But those policy proposals appeared in a long list of proposals not strung together with the easy narrative that politicians need to deliver on the trail; Sanders’ hostility to oligarchy, his refusal to use a Super Pac, his calls for an end to increasing income inequality, his opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and his plan for $1t in infrastructure development were delivered like bullet points. And while those are good bullet points, audiences need to have them woven into comforting narratives of American possibility, made into oral essays that begin and end by returning to a general aspiration. Bernie hit his marks, but he noticeably sounded like he was hitting marks. He’s not wrong to want to cut out aspirational twaddle, but American audiences have been trained to expect the twaddle. You gotta woo us.

O’Malley dropped the ball on Black Lives Matter, too, but of all the speakers, he’s the most worth watching because you could see where he can start absorbing the spotlight – and how he is the sort of dude that political tastemakers will probably bend heaven and hell to make the nominee.

O’Malley’s opening appeal was directed at the authoritarian types who prize executive over legislative experience, citing his 15 combined years as mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland, and then running down his liberal accomplishments: giving driver’s licenses for new immigrants; imposing an assault weapons bans; and instituting marriage equality, among others. From there, he decried growing wealth inequality and the wage gap, called for a $15 minimum wage and and paid family leave, demanded an expansion of Social Security, supported a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and insisted on more prosecutions of crimes by financial institutions.

O’Malley essentially co-opted proposals from both Sanders and Clinton, and slapped a telegenic male face on them in his speech. – and that may be enough in the current political environment. The establishment will try to kill Sanders and Clinton almost as if by reflex: no socialists, thank you, and definitely no senator-candidates who appeal to a “minority” demographic (as though women are a minority) after the whole Obama thing. If Sanders and Clinton get knocked around enough in the press that they become untenable candidates, there will always be O’Malley, sponging both their best lines in the middle – the establishment guy who flirted just enough with progressivism until the rest of the establishment came calling. So as soon as all the pundits and moral arbiters can kick off the rust and really start abusing both the facts and the candidates, it’s going to be a heckuva Democratic race.