Buttigieg indicated as much, smartly but a tad too theatrically. “This is why presidential debates are becoming unwatchable,” he said. “This reminds everybody of what they cannot stand about Washington, scoring points against each other, poking at each other.”

“Yeah, that’s called the Democratic primary election, Pete,” Castro responded as he quickly developed a knack for condescension and sank deeper into his hole. “That’s called an election.” True enough, but I doubt that Castro’s campaign will be making and selling T-shirts with the phrase.

I also doubt that anyone’s fortunes will change much as a result of the debate, though some of the candidates were more appealing and compelling than others.

O’Rourke found a fight and fire that had been missing since his star-making Senate campaign. Buttigieg proved again that he knows what distinguishes him in this field of contenders and how to allude to those qualities in any and every riff. If you finished watching the debate and didn’t realize that he was the youngest candidate on the stage and the only military veteran and gay, then you probably also didn’t register how funny Kamala Harris finds herself, which is to say that Castro would have legitimate issues with your level of awareness.

Something weird has happened to Harris: She has gone from smoothly generating electric moments — on the Senate Judiciary Committee, at the first Democratic presidential debate — to contriving them, so that they have no glow or sizzle at all. I want to root for her but she just won’t let me.

Perhaps the most important figure on the stage was Amy Klobuchar, by which I mean that she most readily accepted and aggressively played the necessary role of suggesting that the most progressive proposals — namely, Medicare for All, backed by both Warren and Bernie Sanders — existed in the realm not of the doable but of the dream-able, and that they weren’t going to fix needy Americans’ lives anytime soon.