Hillary Clinton didn’t hold back from drawing sharp distinctions between her positions and the more liberal ones of Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley in Saturday night’s second Democratic debate. But Clinton’s performance wasn’t just about criticizing her Democratic opponents. It also was a clear preview of the campaign that Clinton is planning to run in the general election—with a message centered around bolstering the middle-class, a vigorous defense of Obama’s accomplishments, and sharp partisan attacks.

On economic policy, Clinton took every opportunity to paint herself as a pragmatist concerned with the middle class. When asked how she’d pay for her domestic priorities—free community college, debt-free public college, paid family leave, and lower drug costs—Clinton stressed that she would be raising taxes on the wealthy and closing corporate loopholes, without burdening “hardworking, middle-class families.”

She emphasized, moreover, the need for an economic plan to be fiscally responsible—a concern that speaks far more to deficit hawks’ concerns about government debt than to the interests of the left. It all lays the groundwork for her to counter the criticism that Republicans are already making about the Democratic agenda: that it will raise taxes on ordinary Americans and blow up the deficit.

She took a similar tack on other economic policy issues, taking every opportunity to sound like the quintessential Reasonable Politician Who Won’t Raise Everyone’s Taxes. When Sanders went after her for failing to support Glass-Steagall—the New Deal-era bill that established a firewall between investment and commercial banking but was repealed during her husband’s presidency—she responded that it simply wouldn’t be pragmatic to do so. “I just don’t think it would get the job done—I just want to make sure we ultimately get results,” she told Sanders.

And what about Sanders’s plan to offer free public college tuition to everyone? “I don’t think taxpayers should be paying for Donald Trump’s kids to go to college,” Clinton quipped. Both responses spoke to Clinton’s ultimate goal in these debates: She knows she’s light years ahead of the opposition, so the debate stage is an opportunity to position herself for the bigger fight ahead.