Slate: Hillary Clinton Won Sunday Night’s Debate [View all]

[Rose Siding]

With a strong defense of President Obama, she got the better of Bernie Sanders.

illary Clinton’s superb debate performance on Sunday raised an unsettling question: If she can be this consistently good on a debate stage, why can’t she replicate that impressiveness on the campaign trail or in interviews? Clinton was once again in superior form Sunday night in South Carolina, besting Sen. Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley in the last Democratic debate before the Iowa caucus.

Clinton’s debating performance is formidable because it combines her intelligence with a sincerity and level of conviction that often seem absent in other forums. When she opened the debate speaking of Martin Luther King Jr.’s role fighting for increased wages, she used his career as a subtle metaphor for what she is pitching: principled leadership with a strong practical bent. That mixture, along with her strength in close-quarter combat and an ability to wrap herself in President Obama’s record—something that played well to the Charleston crowd in the auditorium—was what won her this debate.

Clinton had several strong moments Sunday night. “Ninety people a day die from gun violence in this country,” she noted, before going on to attack Sanders’ record on the Second Amendment, methodically reciting a series of his Congressional votes. For some reason Sanders still struggles when pressed on his gun rights votes; he called Clinton “disingenuous” and said that guns “should not be a political issue.” Sanders has run an impressive race and is challenging Clinton in both Iowa and New Hampshire, but Clinton’s ability to bring him to earth and seem like just another politician—his weird, Trump-like quoting of polls tonight didn’t help—is remarkable. (The moderators helped her tonight by making it appear as if Sanders had changed or updated a number of his positions.)

The same dynamic occurred when the subject turned to health care. Clinton’s attack on Sanders’ support for a single-payer system is, er, “disingenuous” (as Jim Newell pointed out in Slate last week). But the way she attacked Sanders on the issue tonight was effective: She essentially claimed that Sanders’s plan would cause a huge amount of disruption in Obamacare, and thus reopen the battle that has barely ended over the president’s signature program. Sanders needs to figure out a way to answer this criticism, but he certainly didn’t do so tonight.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/01/hillary_clinton_bests_bernie_sanders_in_democratic_debate_in_charleston.html