Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Martin OMalley take part in the second Democratic presidential primary debate. | Getty Off Message Five takeaways from the Democratic debate Clinton shows vulnerabilities, Sanders sounds tone-deaf and O'Malley lives to fight another day.

The second Democratic debate started off like your typical Saturday night in Des Moines — a little sluggish, painfully polite, without the slightest indication of impending excitement. Yet about a half-hour into the debate, the pall cast over the proceedings by the horrendous Paris terror attacks lifted and spirited sparring commenced.

Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, desperate to reverse Hillary Clinton’s momentum, pounced on her connections to Wall Street to put her on the stumbling defensive — exactly as the duo of Barack Obama and John Edwards did to deadly effect in the fall of 2007. But Clinton isn’t nearly as vulnerable this time (mainly because neither of her tormentors is named Obama) and she emerged intact, if not entirely unscathed.


Unlike Clinton’s nearly flawless first debate a month ago, Saturday night’s skirmish exposed familiar weaknesses — a tendency to bog down in stultifying technocratese when she’s playing it safe, coupled with a penchant for spouting factually funky weirdnesses using the very same voice of authority she uses when she’s making perfect sense.

Here are five takeaways:

1. Wall Street is Hillary Clinton’s golden albatross. When not bogged down in the email saga, Clinton and her staff spent much of the summer trying to head off trouble from the Elizabeth Warren, anti-Wall Street, wing of the Democratic Party by producing a comprehensive financial-services regulation proposal. It didn’t quite work.

The plan, released last month, included personal penalties for financial malefactors and imposition of a “risk fee” on big banks. It was generally well received by mainstream liberals like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. But it did little to mollify progressives who suspect she’s a Potemkin village sheriff — with big Wall Street guns like Tom Nides, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin lining up to run her economic team in the White House. “Not good enough,” Sanders said in his most direct attack on Clinton yet. “Why do — why, over her political career, has Wall Street been a major — the major — campaign contributor to Hillary Clinton? You know, maybe they’re dumb and they don’t know what they’re going to get, but I don’t think so.”

The biggest wedge issue is the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act — the Depression-era law that separated commercial banking from investment banking — under her husband’s administration 17 years ago. Sanders, Warren and many progressives view the repeal as the single biggest contributor to the reckless activity that led to the 2008 financial collapse. But Clinton has resisted calls to reinstate Glass-Steagall — even though it undercuts the central argument of her candidacy, that she’s an indefatigable fighter for working-class Americans.

2. Hillary said something really cray-cray. The pressure of the dual Sanders-O’Malley attack on Clinton’s Wall Street connections prompted her to say one of the craziest things she’s uttered in public during this campaign or any other. When Sanders acidly pointed out that Clinton has raked in millions from the wealthy executives at Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, she riposted with a clever reference to gender politics: “You know, not only do I have hundreds of thousands of donors, most of them small, and I’m very proud that for the first time a majority of my donors are women, 60 percent.”

Cool. But things got weird. Even though Bill Clinton had close ties to Wall Street (his Treasury secretary, Rubin, would go on to become head of Citigroup) and financial-sector donors ponied up plenty of cash for her 2000 New York Senate run, she claimed that the main reason bankers have flocked to her cause is — wait for it — because of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. “So I — I represented New York, and I represented New York on 9/11 when we were attacked,” she said, as the moderators from CBS gaped, gob-smacked. “Where were we attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan where Wall Street is. I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild. That was good for New York. It was good for the economy, and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country.”

Needless to say, the remark — delivered in her emphatic shout-voice — raised eyebrows 24 hours after the terror attacks in Paris killed more than 120 people. And it’s not likely to go away. A cascade of obligatory, outraged piling-on ensued: “@HillaryClinton, you reached a new low tonight by using 9/11 to defend your campaign donations,” tweeted RNC Chairman Reince Priebus.

3. Martin O’Malley sort of won. It doesn’t matter. When Clinton worked the rope line at her post-debate party, a supporter shouted “Give ’em hell, Hill!” according to CNN’s Dan Merica — but it was really the poll-challenged O’Malley who wielded the pitchfork. Languishing at 5 percent in the polls, O’Malley has often found himself crushed between Clinton’s mainstream support and Sanders’ hoarse populism, too marginal to attract her support, too polished to garner his. But the former Maryland governor has found his voice, besting both of his rivals during an energetic speech at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner a couple of weeks ago, and he was a confident and confrontational presence on the stage in Des Moines on Saturday — thwacking Sanders on gun rights and Clinton on banks.

His best moment: When Clinton and Sanders were dryly discussing approaches to destroying the Islamic State, O’Malley — reflecting the views of a deeply dovish Democratic base — offered an anecdote from the trail. O’Malley told the story of a U.S. service member’s mother who told him not use the term “boots on the ground” because, she told him, “my son is not a pair of boots on the ground.”

4. Bernie Sanders was bad on Paris. Sanders is an idiosyncratic candidate whose idea of orthodoxy is doing whatever the hell he wants to do. That’s his big selling point as an outsider, but there are reasons why politicians play by a specific set of rules. As my colleague Annie Karni reported, Sanders’ staff wrangled with debate sponsors to keep his 90-second general opening statement from being replaced by each candidate’s comments on the attacks in Paris. That elicited criticism from some fellow Democrats, including some Obama campaign veterans, but Sanders seemed intent not to let the crisis divert him from his core economic inequality message.

Clinton and O’Malley devoted their entire monologues to the crisis, but Sanders offered about 20 seconds — two sentences — to express his shock and disgust before plowing into his planned speech. His transition was beyond awkward: “This country will rid our planet of this barbarous organization called ISIS. I’m running for president because as I go around this nation I talk to a lotta people. And what I hear is people concerned that the economy we have is a rigged economy.”

5. Emails? What emails? The Department of Justice — which seems to be widening its probe of the private email server Clinton used while she was secretary of state — may ultimately have the last word. But the debate’s moderators, O’Malley, and Sanders were content to leave it a nonissue. There was a grand total of one question on the topic, and Sanders — who garnered headlines simply by telling The Wall Street Journal that the DOJ probe is appropriate — reiterated his lack of interest in Clinton’s damn emails.

“That’s just media fluff. I was sick and tired of Hillary Clinton’s email. I am still sick and tired of Hillary Clinton’s email.”