Debates produce winners and losers. And CNN, known to some as the Clinton News Network, saw to it the biggest winner was the Democratic contenders as a group. Recall that when CNN staged a Republican debate, most of the questions were aimed at getting each candidate to attack the others, producing video clips for later use by Democrats in the general elections and a sense that these quarrelling Republican candidates can’t get along with each other, much less with the Democratic counterparts with whom they would have to work to end gridlock. This time around CNN’s Anderson Cooper directed sensible, often piercing policy questions to the five Democrats, producing some disagreement but rarely a personal attack.

There were some significant losers. It was a bad night for millionaires and billionaires, who Senator Sanders believes control the political and economic systems and will continue to do so unless voters respond to his call to turn out in the millions and upend the existing system. It was a very bad night for Lincoln Chafee, whose appeal for votes is based on his opposition to the Iraq and other wars, and only a tad less bad for Martin O’Malley and Jim Webb, who failed to achieve the Fiorina-style breakthrough they need to become serious challengers to Hillary Clinton. It was also a bad night for President Obama, as all the candidates agreed that the middle class is being destroyed (Sanders dates the beginning to some forty years ago, but says it has been on-going in the past seven years), that the poor are getting poorer, students more heavily indebted, big bankers are still roaming the canyons of Wall Street unburdened by criminal records while marijuana smokers are filling our jails, and that the Middle East is a mess either because of insufficient action on his part (Clinton) or an inability to field an Arab army of the sort that a lowly British Lieutenant was able to rally many years ago.