What followed was the most quoted moment of the encounter:

Sanders: “If you are talking about the Wall Street bailout, where some of your friends destroyed this economy ——”

Clinton: “You know ——”

Sanders: “Excuse me, I’m talking.”

Audience: “Oooooh”

It’s certainly a tribute to the general decorum with which the Democrats have conducted themselves that this was enough to draw a gasp from the crowd. The bar is so high on the Republican side that to get a real response one of the candidates would have had to hit the other with a hammer.

But let’s look at the bailout issue for a minute. Sanders did vote for a bill to lend money to the auto industry. But it got blocked in the Senate. Then during the stupendously complex end-of-the-Bush-administration negotiations, the bailout got mooshed into a huge, messy bill that did indeed involve helping Wall Street. When the only choices were nothing or a big, unappetizing legislative stew, he refused to bite.

That pretty much sums up his career in Congress. Sanders stood up for his principles, but he didn’t play any real role. At one point he offered an amendment to raise taxes on high-income individuals, which was basically ignored. He was marvelous, but symbolically marvelous.

He was in no way like Ted Cruz, who just tries to get attention by stopping things. Nobody hates Bernie Sanders. But he’s a maverick legislator, a man without a party. That’s a way, way different kind of life than being the person who has to run the country.

“You have to make hard choices when you’re in positions of responsibility,” Clinton said.

Clinton is a stupendous debater, and she’s developed smooth and sensible-sounding answers to sticky matters like the State Department emails and Benghazi. But she still hasn’t been able to handle Sanders’s attacks on her $225,000 speeches to finance industry insiders. She shrugs and says she’ll release the transcripts when “everybody else does,” which generally involves mentioning that President Obama “took a lot of money from Wall Street.”

“I don’t have any comment,” she said when she was questioned earlier in the week about campaign donations. “I don’t know that. I don’t believe that there is any reason to be concerned about it.”