DES MOINES—Iowa Democrats had themselves a rollicking, yabba-dabba-doo time at the annual Slave-Raper, Indian-Slaughterer fundraising rodeo on Saturday in Des Moines. It was even less of a "dinner" than one of these things usually are, being held this year in the Hy-Vee Center, one of several downtown convention facilities Des Moines has built under the mysterious misapprehension that it is a destination city for such things. The invited guests sat at tables spread out around a soulless concrete space. They were ringed with bleachers, each bank of which was designated for each of the three remaining Democratic candidates. It was very much like attending a raucous society wedding inside a Home Depot outlet.

The subtext of the whole event was the masterful way that Hillary Rodham Clinton had upended the lightweights and mountebanks during her marathon appearance Thursday before the House Special Committee For The Preservation Of Conservative Fantasyland. There was an unspoken sense that the hearing had changed the race in several profound ways. And there was a consensus in the hall that the hearing had marked the beginning of the actual competition for the Democratic nomination. It had managed to get HRC clear of all the nonsense that had been tied to her campaign's ankles for several months. It exposed the Republican congressional majority as a target-rich environment for attack ads and general national ridicule. (It raised permanently the fundamental question of, "Can we really hand the entire government over to these clowns?") And it forced the candidates to run against each other for the first time since this already interminable election cycle began. The only real question remaining was how each of them would use the events of last week to their particular advantage.

Prior to the past few weeks, each of the candidates was campaigning in their own personal bubbles and in the comfortable personae constructed for them by the media. HRC was the frontrunner and the Famous Person (aka The Establishment Choice), to say nothing of a candidate with a past and a present fraught with shadowy enemies and creepy little cabals. Bernie Sanders was The Outsider. Martin O'Malley was the exception that proves the rule. They were running for president, but they were not running against each other. Small wonder that the Joe Biden Might Be Running Or Not cottage industry sprung up and managed to convince a lot of people who should've known better that it was something more than a bunch of people anonymously sending out their resumes through the mass media and turning respectable news organizations into Monster.com.

Then, they finally debated each other, and Biden dropped out, and HRC turned Trey Gowdy into a punchline. Her campaign could not have asked for a better month. So all three of them came into Hy-Vee Hall knowing that the putative Democratic frontrunner had reasserted herself in a very serious way. Their respective reactions to this change in circumstances created a change in tone, an awareness that, to become president, you not only have to sell your vision to the country, but you also have to beat somebody, and a sense that the old constructions had broken down and that realism had returned to Democratic politics. The rhetoric was more barbed, the shots, more direct.

For her part, HRC made the call not to mention her congressional appearance at all, sticking to her stump speech and to her list of policy proposals on everything from opioid addiction to equal pay. But there also came a passage in which she reiterated what she had said during the debate in Las Vegas—that she was a progressive that could get things done. And, after a week in which she had embarrassed congressional Republicans, she pitched herself as someone who had in the past worked with Republicans as a senator. And she showed off what is going to be her fundamental line of attack against Sanders.

"It's not enough to just rail against Republicans and billionaires—we have to win this election."

It was an odd, ironic moment for someone fresh off the kind of triumph that HRC had ridden into Iowa. She didn't even mention—not even in passing, not even as a laugh line—her appearance before the mob of kangaroos in the House of Representatives. It is possible that she is content with letting free media carry that message, so that she can't be accused of "politicizing" her appearance, which may prove to be a shrewd move. But there is no question that Sanders understood what happened last Thursday, and that he recognized the political power of the images that got thrown across the electric teevee screen, and that he was more than aware that he needed to throw a little chin music of his own. If Clinton's argument against him is that he cannot be elected, his argument against her is that she's spent 20 years doing anything to be elected. He stalked the stage, addressing all the people sitting in all the darkened bleachers, and he hacked away at the Pythagorean Theorem of politics that both Bill and Hillary Clinton have practiced in the past. He cut away all three legs of the triangulation.

Without mentioning her name, Sanders relentlessly portrayed Clinton's base-pleasuring moves in this campaign as the same kind of cold political calculations that, in the past, she had made in supporting the Iraq War and the Defense of Marriage Act. (He plainly had no patience with the idea that Clinton supported DOMA in order to defuse the possibility of something even worse coming down the track.) He pounded away on the Wall Street "reforms" of the Bill Clinton administration that led in many ways to the near-catastrophe of 2008. His most precise strikes came when he emphasized his from-jump opposition to both the Keystone XL pipeline—an issue that HRC tried to finesse clumsily for months—and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, about which Sanders said,

"I did not support it yesterday. I do not support it today. And I will not support it tomorrow. It is not now, nor has it ever been, the gold standard of trade agreements."

That was turning the knife of one of HRC's own quotes about the deal, and it was a good, clean shot. If the Democratic campaign turns out to be a fight between how best to achieve progressive goals, and if it becomes the final verdict on whether strategy of triangulation is at best obsolete, and, at worst, a historical failure, then the campaign will carve out an identity for the party going forward, which can't be a bad thing. And, anyway, it was a show worth sitting in a warehouse for, anyway.

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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