Hillary Clinton looked competent, tough, and in control during Tuesday’s low-key Democratic debate in Las Vegas. Clinton excelled amid a field of hapless has-beens, would-be revolutionaries, and ideological outliers by delivering a solid performance and looking like the adult in the room. The reason? She got hardly any pushback from her opponents.
The moment of the evening came when her chief rival, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, effectively rescued Clinton from having to answer in the Democratic primary for her decision to set up a private email server while serving as secretary of state. “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails,” said Sanders to thunderous applause. Clinton laughed gleefully. “Me too, me too!” she said.
That exchange set the tone for the rest of the debate. Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor, tweaked Clinton over her failure to support a reinstitution of the Glass-Steagall act, while former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee made two references to his scandal-free career and suggested Clinton’s email problems could be hurting American “credibility.”
Chafee also knocked Clinton for her support for the Iraq war, which he opposed, but Clinton had a good rejoinder that went over well with the Democratic crowd. “I recall very well being on a debate stage, I think, about 25 times with then Senator Obama, debating this very issue. After the election, he asked me to become Secretary of State,” she said, interrupted by applause. “He valued my judgment, and I spent a lot of time with him.”
But none of the other candidates took advantage of the opportunity to hit Clinton on any of her recent lurches to the left on trade, guns, immigration, and gay rights.
It wasn’t as if Clinton didn’t have stumbles or walk into traps. In a response to a question about Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who has alleged the government is spying on American citizens, she opened the door for her rivals to knock her. “He stole very important information that has unfortunately fallen into a lot of the wrong hands,” Clinton said—something that might have been turned around on the former secretary regarding the classified information that had passed through her unsecured email server. But nobody took the bait, and that was typical of the evening.
In fact, Clinton’s fiercest adversary of the night was the moderator, Anderson Cooper. The CNN anchorman lobbed some pretty tough questions Clinton’s way, starting with a question that called into doubt her sincerity on her policy positions.
“Plenty of politicians evolve on issues, but even some Democrats believe you change your positions based on political expediency,” Cooper said. “You were against same-sex marriage. Now you’re for it. You defended President Obama’s immigration policies. Now you say they’re too harsh. You supported his trade deal dozen of times. You even called it the ‘gold standard.’ Now, suddenly, last week, you’re against it. Will you say anything to get elected?”
It could have tripped her up, but she was ready. Clinton noted that while her principles have remained the same, she does “absorb new information” and “look at what’s happening in the world” when evaluating the issues.
“You know, take the trade deal. I did say, when I was secretary of state, three years ago, that I hoped it would be the gold standard. It was just finally negotiated last week, and in looking at it, it didn’t meet my standards,” Clinton said. “My standards for more new, good jobs for Americans, for raising wages for Americans. And I want to make sure that I can look into the eyes of any middle-class American and say, ‘this will help raise your wages.’ And I concluded I could not.”
It was perhaps her best answer of the night, but Cooper, to his credit, kept pushing. He noted that she had called herself “kind of moderate and center” while campaigning in Ohio last month but in July had said of herself that she takes “a back seat to no one when it comes to progressive values.”
“Do you change your political identity based on who you’re talking to?” Cooper asked.
“No,” Clinton said. “I think that, like most people that I know, I have a range of views, but they are rooted in my values and my experience.” It was a competent response, but slightly less polished. As the debate went on, and as Cooper and another questioner, CNN correspondent Dana Bash, pressed Clinton, she became less sure-footed.
“Everybody on this stage has changed a position or two,” she said in one awkward moment later in the night. “You know, we know that if you are learning, you’re going to change your position. I never took a position on Keystone until I took a position on Keystone.”
In a truly vigorous primary, one of her rivals might have jumped on that line to make the point that on an issue of great importance to environmentalist Democrats, Clinton waited a long time to come out with a position. That rival might have then connected her reticence on the Keystone XL pipeline to her unwillingness to embrace same-sex marriage until much later than many elected Democrats.
Instead, Clinton’s Democratic opponents offered milquetoast gestures toward “new leadership” or wild-eyed calls for “political revolution.” And that gave Clinton the opportunity to turn tough questions to her into sharp criticisms of the Republicans running for president. She couldn’t have asked for a better situation.
For months, Clinton and her allies within the Democratic party power structure have resisted efforts to have more primary debates. They were perhaps working from the theory that the more exposure of the frontrunner to a national audience early in the process, the higher the likelihood she would trip up or be caught in a bind by her opponents. But based on Tuesday’s debate, it’s clear Clinton had little to worry about.
