Pundits say Clinton recovered from stumble

After watching Thursday's debate in Las Vegas, Clark County Commissioner Rory Reid said, "If this were a heavyweight fight, they should have stopped it after the first round."

Reid, the Nevada chairman of Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, thought his candidate gave a commanding performance. As the dust settles from the Democratic showdown, most analysts are agreeing with him.

National political expert Jennifer Duffy's analysis of the debate was succinct: "Hillary's back," she said.

That was the overwhelming consensus of the pundits and columnists and other debate-watching professionals. The CNN Democratic presidential debate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas had the senator from New York taking back the driver's seat, two weeks after her stumbles in a previous debate cast doubt on her hold on the title of front-runner.

Duffy, an analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, a Washington newsletter, said the Democratic race is still competitive, but Clinton "definitely redeemed herself."

Now, it looks less like Clinton ever was truly slipping, and more like a single bad outing snowballed into the perception that she might be, fed by wishful thinking in a race relatively short on drama. Her poor performance at the Oct. 30 debate looks more like a blip than the beginning of a new era.

"The mistake she made two weeks ago was her first mistake," Duffy said. "She didn't make any mistakes (Thursday). She was aggressive, she defended herself, and there was no 'The boys were being mean to me.'"

Meanwhile, none of her rivals were able to contend with the newly engaged Clinton. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina tried, but they couldn't bounce back when Clinton zinged them on their policies and positions.

"Her experience showed," Duffy said. "Not her resume -- her experience as a candidate, as a politician. Obama's inexperience showed. And Edwards was just sort of there."

Clinton's opponents, naturally, take issue with the idea that "The lady is a champ," as Des Moines Register columnist David Yepsen put it in a headline that combined the night's ubiquitous pugilistic trope with a nicely Vegas-appropriate Sinatra reference.

Speaking to reporters in Henderson on Friday, Edwards portrayed Clinton as callous for answering a question about the North American Free Trade Agreement with flippancy and a laugh.

"My response, and it's very personal to me, is that this is not a joking matter for the millions of Americans who lost their jobs" because of NAFTA, he said after meeting with union nurses at St. Rose Dominican Hospitals-Siena Campus on Friday morning.

"I saw what happened when the mill in my hometown, the mill my father worked in, closed," he said. "It was absolutely devastating."

Asked whether he was mudslinging, as Clinton asserted during the debate, Edwards said, "I was telling the truth." Clinton's closeness to the corporate interests who have disproportionate power in American government is a fact, not a personal attack, he said.

The Clinton campaign, in response, would not defend her NAFTA answer but lashed out at Edwards' "ridiculous attacks."

Obama's campaign also was looking for a silver lining in his performance, generally seen as lackluster.

Obama supporter Steven Horsford, a state senator from Las Vegas, said people will go back to Clinton's words and realize her answers weren't good enough.

"Senator Clinton couldn't even answer a simple question like choosing between diamonds and pearls," Horsford said when asked what he thought was the debate's most telling moment.

In the night's final question, Clinton had answered, "I want both."

The issue isn't that candidates' taste in jewelry matters to voters, Horsford said, but that they shouldn't be afraid to take sides. "You've got to be able to just answer a question straight," he said.

Horsford pointed to Clinton's position on Social Security as a more serious example of lacking decisiveness. In the debate, she repeated that she wanted to restore "fiscal responsibility" before proposing any particular fix to the system, such as increasing the cap on income subject to the payroll tax, currently $97,000.

Obama said the cap should be adjusted, which Clinton called a "trillion-dollar tax increase." Obama retorted that the only people whose taxes would be raised were the richest 6 percent, and accused her of "playing with numbers."

Clinton fired back, "I listened very carefully to what Senator Obama said when he appeared on one of the Sunday morning shows, and he basically said that he was for looking at a lot of different things and using a bipartisan commission to do it. I think that's the right answer."

She may not have dealt with the payroll tax issue, but she had the last word.

The Social Security issue "has no easy answer, politically, because if you're going to fix it, somebody's going to feel the pain," Duffy said. "Obama did take a side, and she didn't. But she also didn't upset anybody."

On the whole, she said, the debate was both climactic and anticlimactic. It represented the zenith of the most intense drumbeat of anticipation to date in the campaign. But it also didn't feed those with Clinton bloodlust.

"I always say debates are like Olympic figure skating," Duffy said. "You're watching for one of two things. You want to see someone do something really well, or you want to see someone fall down. Anything else is just good skating."

In this case, Clinton "kind of hit the quad," she said. "Obama maybe didn't fall down, but he stumbled. And Edwards just kind of skated well."

Duffy did have a quibble with one of Clinton's lines, however: Early on, she declared, "This pantsuit, it's asbestos."

"I thought that was terrible," Duffy said. "Isn't asbestos a toxic carcinogen?"

Contact reporter Molly Ball at mball@reviewjournal.com or (702) 387-2919.