NEW YORK—So the two Democratic presidential candidates put on a decent show on Thursday night. They played their roles up to the hilt and beyond. With one notable exception, which we will get to in a moment, they conformed almost perfectly not only to the personae their campaigns have worked so hard to create, but also, and oddly, to the personae each has created for the other. Presidential campaigns have become essentially design competitions, with agreed-upon rules among the candidates that are violated at considerable peril. So we had Hillary Rodham Clinton criticizing Bernie Sanders for serving up large portions of airborne pie and Sanders criticizing HRC for being too much a vehicle for the money power and for being too cautious—he virtually spat the word "incrementalism" at her—in her approach to the nation's most serious problems. It is now a debate between "You can't do what you want to do" and "You don't want to do enough." And each of them made virtues out of the other's criticisms and, in doing so, validated them to each other.

(Clinton's use of human shields—whether that is the bereaved parents of the Sandy Hook victims or the president himself—is beginning to get just a touch tiresome. )

In truth, it is almost impossible to imagine at this point a gun-safety bill that a President Sanders wouldn't sign, just as it is impossible at this point to imagine a President Hillary Rodham Clinton rolling back Wall Street regulations. But Sanders never has developed a good way of saying the former, nor Clinton a good way to answer the latter charges. So we had a tit-for-tat exchange about HRC's speeches and Sanders's tax returns, issues that do not matter to anyone except their respective accountants—and, if her husband is to be believed, Jane Sanders. When HRC challenged Sanders to name one policy decision she has made as a result of being paid for her speeches, he was unable to do so.

BASH: Senator Sanders, you have consistently criticized Secretary Clinton for accepting money from Wall Street. Can you name one decision that she made as senator that shows that she favored banks because of the money she received?

SANDERS: Sure. Sure. The obvious decision is when the greed and recklessness and illegal behavior of wall street brought this country into the worst economic downturn since the Great Recession—the Great Depression of the '30s, when millions of people lost their jobs, and their homes, and their life savings, the obvious response to that is that you've got a bunch of fraudulent operators and that they have got to be broken up. That was my view way back, and I introduced legislation to do that. Now, Secretary Clinton was busy giving speeches to Goldman Sachs for $225,000 a speech. So the problem response—the proper response in my view is we should break them up. And that's what my legislation does.

CLINTON: Well, you can tell, Dana, he cannot come up with any example, because there is no example.

The speeches themselves are an example. Why any politician with presidential ambitions would get within five miles of the people who wrecked most of the economy and stole the rest of it in the 2000s is its own answer. The reason is that politics is money now, and that's where the easy money is. For myself, I think there isn't a damned thing in any of those speeches that should cause HRC a millisecond of agita, but also that going on 30 years of pestiferous ratfcking has made her jump at shadows. So she digs in, and the debate becomes about her digging in, and not about the fog of subtle corruption that has descended over the entire political process. Goldman Sachs should be as toxic an audience today as R.J. Reynolds is. Yes, both candidates railed against Citizens United—which is easy since, at the moment, there's nothing either one of them can do about it—but the money power has leached into so many areas and institutions that squabbling over who said what to whom, and what exemptions you may have taken in 2008, is sadly beside the point. The sale has been closed.

So, it was probably inevitable that the revelatory exchange came during a discussion of foreign policy, which is perceived to be HRC's wheelhouse and Sanders' greatest vulnerability, and which also is the area furthest from the discussion of the money power in domestic politics. Asked about the endless cycle of violence between Israel and the Palestinian people in Gaza, Sanders tiptoed into a minefield.

SANDERS: Well, as somebody who spent many months of my life when I was a kid in Israel, who has family in Israel, of course Israel has a right not only to defend themselves, but to live in peace and security without fear of terrorist attack. That is not a debate. But—but what you just read, yeah, I do believe that. Israel was subjected to terrorist attacks, has every right in the world to destroy terrorism. But we had in the Gaza area—not a very large area—some 10,000 civilians who were wounded and some 1,500 who were killed. Now, if you're asking not just me, but countries all over the world was that a disproportionate attack, the answer is that I believe it was, and let me say something else. And, let me say something else. As somebody who is 100% pro-Israel, in the long run—and this is not going to be easy, God only knows, but in the long run if we are ever going to bring peace to that region which has seen so much hatred and so much war, we are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity. So what is not to say—to say that right now in Gaza, right now in Gaza unemployment is s somewhere around 40%. You got a log of that area continues, it hasn't been built, decimated, houses decimated health care decimated, schools decimated. I believe the United States and the rest of the world have got to work together to help the Palestinian people. That does not make me anti-Israel.

In response, HRC went full pander.

I negotiated the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in November of 2012. I did it in concert with...President Abbas of the Palestinian authority based in Ramallah, I did it with the then Muslim Brotherhood President, Morsi, based in Cairo, working closely with Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli cabinet. I can tell you right now I have been there with Israeli officials going back more than 25 years that they do not seek this kind of attacks. They do not invite the rockets raining down on their towns and villages. They do not believe that there should be a constant incitement by Hamas aided and abetted by Iran against Israel. And, so when it came time after they had taken the incoming rockets, taken the assaults and ambushes on their soldiers and they called and told me, I was in Cambodia, that they were getting ready to have to invade Gaza again because they couldn't find anybody to talk to tell them to stop it, I flew all night, I got there, I negotiated that. So, I don't know how you run a country when you are under constant threat, terrorist tact, rockets coming at you. You have a right to defend yourself. That does not mean—that does not mean that you don't take appropriate precautions. And, I understand that there's always second guessing anytime there is a war. It also does not mean that we should not continue to do everything we can to try to reach a two-state solution, which would give the Palestinians the rights and…the autonomy that they deserve. And, let me say this, if Yasser Arafat had agreed with my husband at Camp David in the Late 1990s to the offer then Prime Minister Barak put on the table, we would have had a Palestinian state for 15 years.

Sanders declined to let the issue go, and eventually, managed to maneuver HRC into a kind of unblinking support of Benjamin Netanyahu that seemed to undercut her position as an honest broker in the region.

SANDERS: There comes a time—there comes a time when if we pursue justice and peace, we are going to have to say that Netanyahu is not right all of the time.

CLINTON: ... you know, I have spoken about and written at some length the very candid conversations I've had with him and other Israeli leaders. Nobody is saying that any individual leader is always right, but it is a difficult position. If you are from whatever perspective trying to seek peace, trying to create the conditions for peace when there is a terrorist group embedded in Gaza that does not want to see you exist, that is a very difficult challenge.

It is at the very least arguable to include Netanyahu in any group that is "trying to create the conditions for peace." Coupled with Sanders' earlier suggestions that the other members of NATO should be footing more of the alliance's costs, and linking that position with the fact that those nations have been able to afford the kind of social safety net that he would like to see in this country at least in part because the United States has been spending its own money to keep them safe, this was at least a new area of disagreement, a genuine insider-outsider argument that hasn't been pounded into the ground over the past 18 months.

(And Dana Bash, who had a terrific night otherwise, had a bad moment when she responded to Sanders' answer about NATO by pointing out that He, Trump has said something similar. So what?)

I gave up long ago on the notion that these debates move anyone toward positions that they don't already hold, but every little burst of the unexpected stands out like a skyrocket in the middle of the clouds. The design competition can use any flash of style it can get.

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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