On substance, Hillary was horrible in the first debate. Bernie crushed her.
It was clear that Clinton came extremely prepared and looked very comfortable in the debate. However, she's also mastered the art of doublespeak, and is quite skilled at equivocation and deflecting questions. She was very evasive and ambiguous in her answers on marijuana legalization and whether health care benefits should be extended to children of undocumented immigrants. She also answered a challenge to her support for the Iraq War not with a defense or an apology, but by invoking President Obama, and how he picked her as Secretary of State despite her Iraq vote. She dodged the question over her flip-flops, mislead the audience about her previous TPP stance, lied about whistle-blower protections for Edward Snowden, and gave a nonsense answer about why she calls herself a "progressive" in front of some people, but a "moderate" in front of others.
Clinton should have been needled for framing her cynical poll-following as "learning new information." And saying that she's a political outsider and wouldn't be a third term Obama "because she's a woman" was pathetic pandering on her part, especially when other candidates specifically outlined their policy differences with the Obama administration, which Clinton failed to articulate.
Furthermore, there's nothing progressive about Hillary's soft imperialism. Being slightly better than the right-wing neocons is nothing to brag about. In future debates, she needs to be hit hard on her militarism, especially when her hawkish instincts and convictions are way out of step with the party's base, and are solidly to the right of even President Obama's. Obama beat her in 2008 largely by running to her left on foreign affairs and national security matters. If Sanders is serious for the nomination, he needs to brush up on foreign policy and do the same. Clinton has inoculated herself on domestic policy by moving to the left on key issues thanks to Sanders and others (Kesytone XL pipeline, TPP, Cadillac tax, same-sex marriage, immigration, capital gains taxes, Social Security, Wall Street regulation, student debt, etc.), but she's just as hawkish as she was 15 years ago, providing an opening for Sanders to exploit in the future if he's politically savvy and smart.
In contrast, Sanders wasn't particularly polished, paused a bit too much, and rambled at times, but he came off as principled, trustworthy, and authentic. Clinton continued to be her risk-averse self, consistently avoiding taking firm positions on controversial issues, whereas Sanders was pretty open and direct about where he stood, which will definitely add to his appeal.
In my view, Sanders was very shaky in the first third of the debate, especially when he refused to say he's a capitalist and when everyone ganged up on him for his moderate views on gun policy. Sanders also needs to brush up on foreign policy.
After the break, Sanders recomposed himself and went on the offensive and had some great moments, such as his comments dismissing the Clinton e-mail controversy and "Congress doesn't regulate Wall Street, Wall Street regulates Congress." He held his own against Clinton, and nailed home his economic justice message that resonates with so many people. He had solid rhetoric without shying away from concrete policy, and finished on a relatively strong note. Surprisingly, Sanders shined on many non-economic issues, such as immigration, civil liberties, mass surveillance, mass incarceration, institutional racism, marijuana legalization, whistle-blowing, and other topics important to progressives. He promptly slapped down the gotcha question over the 2007 immigration bill he opposed because of his concern over certain guest worker provisions.
Bernie Sanders is overwhelmingly crushing Hillary Clinton on online opinion polls. Also focus groups at CNN and Fox, and elsewhere, overwhelmingly supported Bernie over Hillary. We're all political junkies, and we've been following Bernie super closely for a very long time. So we feel underwhelmed because we know Bernie could have done better, and we've seen him do much better. But for the millions of people watching him for the first time, even if he wasn't perfect or didn't give his best performance, he was still mindblowing to people who didn't know about him before, and how he was so incredibly honest, forthright, and unorthodox as a politician. Never before in a mainstream debate has a presidential candidate dared to question the core system of wealth & power.
And Sanders deserves a huge amount of credit for framing the whole conversation in the debate. Virtually everything that was talked about tonight onstage happened because Sanders was the only one with the history of dignity to bring it up. Sanders has already played a very large role in this primary election in shifting the Overton window leftward, and he set the tone for the debate. He's acted as an instigator that is pushing many Democrats, including Clinton, much further to the left than they otherwise would have been, making the Democratic Party a more genuinely left-wing and progressive party. Overall, it was a good debate, several hundred times more substantive than the GOP ones, and I'm interested in seeing how this race progresses.
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