The seventh Democratic debate of the 2016 season took place against the backdrop of a landslide Bernie Sanders victory in the New Hampshire primary and an electrifying sixth debate that took place just before voters went to the polls. Compared with the previous showdown, it was a much lower-key affair, with more moderator involvement and less boring down on particular points of disagreement. 
 
 Both candidates, ultimately, delivered on their key themes, played up their key strengths, and likely pleased their key supporters. 
 
 And they fought not just over who would win the nomination but also to a considerable degree over how we should understand both the future and the past of the Democratic Party. So here are three players who ended up in a stronger position than they were in before the debate, as well as three who wound up weaker. 
 
 Winner: Hillary Clinton 
 
 She didn't score any knockout blows or hit any home runs Thursday night, but the reality is that she didn't need to. 
 
 Playing small ball and successfully turning the debate into a series of tedious, hard-to-follow exchanges is good enough for the candidate who currently enjoys a large lead in national polls. Recall that outside of the hothouse of internet commentary, most Democrats currently have a favorable view of both candidates, and a large swath of Democrats still don't know who Sanders is. 
 
 Nothing happened Thursday night that would make a person who previously liked Clinton stop liking her, and if this was your first exposure to That Guy Who Is Running Against Hillary Clinton you wouldn't have been blown away. 
 
 Sanders is coming off a very good 10-day run that must be leaving the candidate and his senior staff feeling both exhilarated and exhausted. The result was a dangerously complacent debate performance. 
 
 Despite his stellar fundraising and New Hampshire performance, Sanders is still a major underdog who has a limited amount of time to change the dynamic before delegates start getting assigned very quickly. Sanders did nothing to assuage related doubts about his electability and his grasp of foreign policy matters, and didn't add anything new to his well-known critique of Clinton. 
 
 Winner: Black Lives Matter 
 
 Twenty, 10, or even two years ago it would be almost impossible to imagine national politicians dedicating as much time and attention to the problem of police violence as we heard onstage Thursday night. 
 
 The politics of looking anti-police or soft on crime were just too perilous. Things are different now. 
 
 Sanders promised to "end overpolicing in African-American neighborhoods" and proclaimed himself "sick and tired of seeing videos on television of unarmed people — often African Americans — shot by police officers." 
 
 Meanwhile, Clinton spoke of the "dark side" of law enforcement and repeatedly referred to "systemic racism." 
 
 The context is that stumping for black votes is a necessity for any Democrat trying to win primaries in South Carolina and other Southern states. And the Black Lives Matter activist community has successfully pushed the issue to the absolute top of the agenda in terms of black politics. 
 
 That's a remarkable achievement. The underlying issue in which the consequences of heavy-handed policing fall disproportionately on black communities is decades (if not centuries) old, but the entire issue was completely invisible in the 2004 and 2008 primary cycles. It was very much not invisible last night. 
 
 Winner: Barack Obama 
 
 Clinton ran against Obama in a bitter campaign in 2008, and many of Sanders's most fervent supporters think he's a weak-kneed neoliberal sellout tool of Wall Street. But no hostile sentiments were evident from either candidate on Thursday night. 
 
 On the contrary, Clinton made a vigorous defense of the Obama legacy — and suggestions that Sanders is less than fully committed to it — the centerpiece of her argument. Early on she defined herself as an advocate of "President Obama's principal accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act," and slammed Sanders for jeopardizing it. 
 
 The essential strategy, seen several times during the debate — but most crucially during an exchange over Wall Street — was to use Obama as a human shield. 
 
 Did Sanders want to say that Obama was corrupt because he received campaign contributions from the financial sector? When Sanders says we need a political revolution, does that mean he thinks Obama was a failure? 
 
 Sanders largely refused to take the bait, declining to criticize Obama even when that forced him to blunt his criticisms of Clinton. That even the left opposition within the Democratic Party doesn't want to voice clear criticisms of the president makes Obama a clear winner. 
 
 Loser: Republicans 
 
 His fans don't like to admit it, but every single Republican in Washington is dying to run against Bernie Sanders. 
 
 The problem isn't really the specifics of socialism or this or that. It's the basic reality that Sanders has clearly positioned himself to the left of Obama and voters want a candidate who is to the right of Obama. 
 
 That doesn't mean Sanders is hopeless. Voters still think Republicans are too conservative, and any Democrat has a chance of winning by arguing that the country needs a check on congressional Republicans, but it gives Sanders a baseline weakness as a candidate relatively to Clinton. Clinton's strong performance is bad news for those hoping to face off against him in November. 
 
 Loser: Wall Street 
 
 A handful of Democrat-friendly Wall Street types and Wall Street–friendly Democratic operatives types have recently expressed to me a fuzzy yearning for Clinton to push back against Sanders's line that "the business model of Wall Street is fraud." Selfishly, they would like pushback because they find this argument offensive, and while they are confident Sanders's bank-busting legislation won't be enacted, they don't like to see their personal reputations dragged through the mud. 
 
 More high-mindedly, they make the case that Clinton can't defend her Wall Street fundraising unless she can establish the argument that investment banks and hedge funds are legitimate players in the American economy, just like farms, ice cream companies, quaint B&Bs, and whatever else it is they do in Vermont. 
 
 It didn't happen. On finance, Clinton defended herself from Sanders's attacks by just further punching the banking industry. She argued that Sanders's proposals don't target a wide enough range of institutions and that Sanders himself has voted at least once for financial deregulation. Hundreds of D-leaning donors, bundlers, and lobbyists are left feeling lonely tonight. 
 
 Loser: Henry Kissinger 
 
 For the first time in the Democratic campaign, Bernie Sanders had a foreign policy exchange where he looked loose, comfortable, and confident. The issue, somewhat surprisingly, was former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whom Clinton had name-dropped and cited as a friend and a source of advice on several occasions. 
 
 "I happen to believe that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country," Sanders said. "I'm proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend." 
 
 Clinton seemed a little surprised to be facing this line of argument, and rather than defend Kissinger on the merits of the various charges leveled against him, simply deflected with the notion that he is knowledgeable about China. A whole new generation of young Sanders-loving liberals are likely to find themselves checking out books like Gary Bass's The Blood Telegram to find out about Kissinger's involvement in Pakistan's brutal military campaign against Bangladesh. ||||| In what was easily her strongest debate performance in recent memory – and arguably her strongest since the campaign began – Hillary Clinton was calm, cool and collected at Thursday night’s debate. 
 
 Clinton could’ve been understandably on edge, as she was fresh off a resounding loss in New Hampshire on Tuesday and an effective tie in Iowa the week before. But it was Sanders who was oddly on the defensive despite what has been momentum in his favor, starting out the night more combative than Clinton and wasting his time on petty one-liners. (When Clinton talked about building political capital when she’s in the White House, for instance, Sanders began a rebuttal with “Secretary Clinton, you’re not in the White House yet.”) 
 
 Perhaps it was understandable that Sanders appeared to be on defensive as the major topics of the night – race, foreign policy and relations with Obama – are all considered areas of relative weakness for the income inequality-focused Sanders, though the the depth of his policy knowledge and ability to articulate it before audiences, particularly on race issues, has improved markedly since the campaign began. 
 
 Still, as winning over minority voters will be one of the principal areas of focus for both candidates going into southern primaries like the one in South Carolina and polls show that Sanders is struggling to eat into Clinton’s lead in the coming contests, expectations were high for Sanders this debate. 
 
 And while both candidates performed well initially in talking about systemic racism and reforming the criminal justice system, it was Sanders who stumbled when a moderator asked if race relations would be better handled under him than the current president. It was a foreseeable trap – asking a white man whether he’d do a better job on race issues than the first black president – but Sanders didn’t seem to see what he was walking into. 
 
 “Absolutely,” he said in response to the moderator’s question before slipping into his classic stump speech. “Because what we will do is instead of giving tax breaks to billionaires, we are going to create millions of jobs for low-income kids so they’re not hanging out on street corners. We’re going to make sure those kids stay in school are able to get a college education.” 
 
 It was as tone-deaf a line as any all night and, worse yet, it may have reminded Clinton of another line of attack she’d prepared in advance. In an MSNBC interview earlier on Thursday, Sanders had criticized President Obama’s failure to connect with Congress, saying in an interview with MSNBC, “There’s a huge gap right now between Congress and the American people. ... What presidential leadership is about [is] closing that gap.” 
 
 From a political analyst’s perspective, it’s a completely valid criticism – but when you’re running in a Democratic primary with an extremely popular Democratic president, it is, well, a weird move. 
 
 And Clinton didn’t let him – or the audience – forget about that or other critiques of the president, pivoting near the end of evening to Sander’s frequent criticism of Obama. “I want to follow up on something having to do with leadership” she said, “because, you know, today Senator Sanders said that President Obama failed the presidential leadership test. And this is not the first time.” 
 
 Then, without changing her even tone in the slightest, Clinton launched her most vicious attack on Sanders of the debate, running down a list of the times Sanders had called the president “weak” and “a disappointment”. She ended with, “I don’t think [Obama] gets the credit he deserves.” 
 
 The argument over Obama’s legacy is one that Clinton’s campaign has been wanting to have with Sanders for some time, and Sanders set her up for an easy hit. Viewers at home watching the candidates on a split screen could see Sanders huffing and puffing as Clinton spoke, laughing angrily to himself and scribbling notes as she spoke. He clearly hadn’t been expecting that line of attack, though he might well have anticipated it. When he finally did get time to respond, he told the woman whom he’d earlier all but accused of accepting campaign donations in direct exchange for political favors that repeating his own words “was a low blow”, indignantly and with no cool whatsoever. 
 
 It was a bad look for Bernie – whom the cameras often caught wagging a finger at the moderators while Clinton spoke – and it left him struggling to articulate the reasons for the distance between himself and a popular president, a distance he’d previously tried to wave away before when an interview Obama gave to Politico seemed to suggest that the sitting president favors Clinton over Bernie. 
 
 Throughout the debate, on practically every topic, Clinton’s cool demeanor played well. Even on the one topic that should have gotten under her skin – why more New Hampshire women, particularly young women, didn’t vote for her – she resisted the temptation to be or even sound critical. 
 
 “I have spent my entire adult life making sure that women are empowered to make their own choices even if that choice is not to vote for me” she said, adding that she hoped that they’d vote their consciences in the primary and learn more about her before the general election. 
 
 After Clinton surrogates like Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem made the mistake of being insufficiently deferential to younger women last week – possibly costing her at least a few votes – Clinton didn’t have a lot of room to err in her answer, and she didn’t. 
 
 It was, instead, her opponent who made the mistake – repeatedly this debate – of being too quick to anger and allowing his feelings to affect his answers. Clinton, who can hardly express an emotion in public without her ability to lead being called into question, didn’t have that luxury, and she didn’t try to indulge in it. 
 
 For once, that was an advantage. ||||| At a debate in Milwaukee, Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton diverged slightly on how they would reform health care and immigration, while largely agreeing on the need for change in policing. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post) 
 
 Forty-eight hours after Bernie Sanders crushed Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary, the two Democratic candidates faced off in the sixth debate of the presidential primary season. I picked some of the best and the worst of the night that was. And make sure to check out our annotated transcript of the debate too! 
 
 Winners 
 
 * Hillary Clinton: Beginning to end, this was Clinton's best debate of the election. In the first half hour, Clinton poked a series of holes in Sanders's health-care proposal and broadly cast the Vermont senator as someone who talks a big game but simply can't hope to achieve his goals. She was calm and cool throughout -- even when fighting on Sanders's home turf on wage inequality. Clinton also effectively cast Sanders as insufficiently loyal to President Obama, a point that will resound with black voters among whom Obama remains extremely popular. 
 
 Clinton was helped by the dearth of questions about uncomfortable topics for her (paid speeches, State Department investigations); when pressed on her super PAC being financed heavily by a few individuals, Clinton was uncomfortable and gave one of her worst answers of the night. But, those moments were few and far between. If she -- and her campaign -- were knocked back after her massive loss in New Hampshire, it didn't show. She was in total control all night. 
 
 * Barack Obama: It's sort of hard to believe that the Hillary Clinton currently embracing Barack Obama on every issue actually ran -- and ran hard -- against him back in 2007 and 2008. At every turn, Clinton found ways to praise Obama's bravery, his forethought and his judgment. And even Sanders, put on defense by Clinton's rabid pro-Obamaism, did what he could to tie himself to the outgoing president -- going as far as to note that Obama campaigned for him in Vermont. 
 
 Whether they agreed or disagreed, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders had to work hard to differentiate themselves at Thursday's debate. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post) 
 
 * My bedtime: Look, this has been a very long week. So, thank you PBS, for not only ending the debate on time but actually ending it seven minutes early. You have no idea what this means to me. 
 
 * GIFs: Sanders's reaction shots during a debate are what these little beauties were created for. 
 
 Exhibit A 
 
 Exhibit B 
 
 'Nuff said. 
 
 Losers 
 
 * Bernie Sanders: If the challenge for Sanders was to show that he could be a candidate for people other than those who already love him, he didn't make much progress toward that goal Thursday night. Sanders did come across as more well-versed on foreign policy than in debates past -- a low bar -- but he struggled to score clean hits on Clinton during the first hour of the debate, which focused exclusively on domestic policy, which should have been his strong suit. Sanders, at times during that first hour, sounded like a broken record -- citing millionaires and billionaires and Wall Street to explain almost anything he was asked. 
 
 "Senator Sanders, what's your favorite ice cream flavor?" 
 
 "Wall Street billionaires." — Nick Confessore (@nickconfessore) February 12, 2016 
 
 Then there was Sanders's insistence that he would be better on race relations than Obama, a slip that the Clinton campaign certainly will make sure African American voters hear about (and then hear about some more) in the coming days and weeks. 
 
 * Opening statements: Why. Do. These. Still. Exist. No debate should have opening or closing statements. The last thing voters need to hear is another recitation of the candidates' stump speeches. Let's make America great again and get rid of opening statements. 
 
 * Henry Kissinger: Who the heck would have predicted that Kissinger would (a) come up in the debate or (b) come under such withering attack from Sanders. Both happened!
– After Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders faced off in the first Democratic debate since Sanders' big win in New Hampshire, critics agreed there was one big loser: Henry Kissinger, who came under merciless attack from Bernie Sanders. "I'm proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend," Sanders told Clinton. Here's what people had to say about the candidates' performances: "This was Clinton's best debate of the election," decides Chris Cilliza at the Washington Post. She was "in total control all night" and scored plenty of points against Sanders, he writes, while Sanders stumbled despite an improved command of foreign policy—and will probably regret claiming that he will be better on race relations than President Obama. Clinton didn't score any home runs but she still won, according to Matthew Yglesias at Vox. Nothing happened that would cause Clinton supporters to think twice, he writes, while voters getting a first look at Sanders would not have been impressed: The candidate turned in a "dangerously complacent debate performance" and failed to assuage "doubts about his electability" or add anything new to his critique of Clinton. Scot Lehigh at the Boston Globe also calls the debate for Clinton. She came out on top by "presenting herself as a deeply knowledgeable candidate whose progressive stands are tempered by real-world practicality," he writes. This was the case in her attacks on Sanders' plan for a single-payer health care system, where Clinton stressed that the "focus should be on expanding coverage and care to those who still lack it, rather than starting from scratch and overhauling the entirety of the system." Both candidates "performed well initially in talking about systemic racism and reforming the criminal justice system," but the "calm, cool, and collected" Clinton prevailed, writes Lucia Graves at the Guardian. Sanders, she writes, "was oddly on the defensive despite what has been momentum in his favor, starting out the night more combative than Clinton and wasting his time on petty one-liners." Click for some of the debate's best lines.