 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. 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. “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.
– 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.