I did not watch the Democratic presidential debate Tuesday night, because I have a life, and the baseball playoffs were on.

Others did, starting with David Harsanyi:

When Democratic Party presidential hopefuls were asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper to list enemies they had made during their careers that they were most proud of, the only candidate who didn’t include any fellow Americans was Jim Webb. Webb—who, it should be noted, didn’t exactly answer the question—explained that it was an enemy soldier who once threw a grenade and wounded him; a soldier who was no longer around. Jim Webb killed a commie because Jim Webb loves America.

Many liberals on social media found this revelation sorta creepy. Yet there was probably a time when liberal voters would have been impressed by someone who had served his country so valiantly. They might have seen promise in a candidate whose populist sensibilities could speak convincingly to the working class and to Southerners, and whose appeal was propelled by both idealism and realism. Webb might have been formidable Democrat presidential candidate 15 years ago. Twenty-five years ago he might have been a star. Today? He’s a man completely out of touch with the philosophical temperament of his party.

Webb may have fought in a war against collectivist authoritarians, but today he’s debating one—a less threatening socialist who regularly lectures thousands of excitable sycophants about the need for more coercion and redistribution. This would have been anathema even for Barack Obama even in 2008. Bernie Sanders is not stigmatized by his ideology. Today there’s almost no genuine philosophical daylight between Sanders’ ideas and the professed positions of front-runner Hillary Clinton. Their disagreement is over what’s achievable. Yet Beltway wisdom tells us only one party has been radicalized in America. Democrats are the adults.

So there was Webb, listening to the former Baltimore mayor lecturing America about how to stop gun violence. There was the former secretary of State, a product of nepotism, big money, and cynical identity politics, who’s flipped on nearly every issue for expediency at some point in her public life, lecturing America about her experience. Lincoln Chafee is not the sort of guy who’s going to be ready on day one. And there was the Democratic Socialist, who plans to spend trillions of dollars on redistributive policies that have created misery and poverty around the world, lecturing us about economics.

“I’ve got a great deal of admiration and affection for Sen. Sanders,” Webb retorted after one of the Vermont senator’s diatribes about toppling the oligarchy. “But, Bernie, I don’t think the revolution’s going to come, and I don’t think the Congress is going to pay for a lot of this stuff.”

Maybe that’s where Webb is wrong. The revolutionary candidate (even when you include Joe Biden) is polling at 24 percent.

So while the revolutionary candidate blames the wealthy, Webb refused to engage in ugly pandering. He insisted that all lives matter when asked the loaded “Black lives or all lives” question by a Facebook user. He refuses to offer soundbites that will please anyone on foreign policy. He’s the only candidate to talk about abuses against privacy from the last administration and point out that this president is guilty of abuses of executive power. He was the only candidate on the stage in Las Vegas who did not selectively embrace the Constitution to make a point about some pet political issue.

Webb detests politics just like the rest of us. You can see it in his eyes. He hates campaigning. He doesn’t like raising money. Last night, Webb exhibited contempt for the bunkum that poured from mouths of people who can claim that climate change is the most pressing problem mankind faces. And I have little doubt he would have been similarly unimpressed by most of the platitudinous answers Republicans offered in their debates.

Now, Webb would be far more conservative than the GOP frontrunner, but his moderate positions on tax policy, immigration, and foreign affairs would make him just disagreeable to most conservatives as he is to most liberals. He isn’t exactly right for either party—not because of some triangulation or convenient moderation, but because he’s not an ideologue. He’s also not a coward, as he’s unwilling to say whatever his party demands in the pursuit of power

In theory, these are all commendable traits. These, in fact, are the sort of things voters are always pretending to look for in a candidate. In reality, this authenticity gets you to around 0.7 percent in the polls. Americans claim not to like the partisanship of Washington. What they mean is they dislike the other guy’s partisanship. What it means for candidates like Jim Webb, serious people who deserve to be heard, is obscurity.

Then there was Comrade Sanders,  of which Kevin D. Williamson writes:

If you are the sort of person who has better things to do — which is to say, a fully functioning adult who is not professionally obliged to follow these things — then you probably missed the exchange between Mrs. Clinton and Senator Sanders at last night’s debate, when she lectured him that the United States isn’t Denmark and he responded with a rousing defense of the Danish model.

Never mind, for the moment, that neither of these batty old geezers has the foggiest idea of what’s going on in Denmark, or in the other Nordic countries. Denmark, like Sweden before it, has been engaged in a long campaign of reforming its famously generous welfare state. The country’s current prime minister is the leader of a center-right party, which, strangely enough, goes by the name “Left,” Venstre. (You might even call it libertarian; its former longtime leader wrote a book bearing the positively Nozickian title “From Social State to Minimal State.”) Denmark has been marching in the direction exactly opposite socialism for some time. Our friends at the Heritage Foundation rank its economy the eleventh most free in the world, one place ahead of the United States, reflecting Denmark’s strong property rights, relative freedom from corruption, low public debt, freedom of trade and investment, etc.

Don’t tell Senator Sanders, but Denmark’s corporate tax rate is a heck of a lot lower than our own.

Senator Sanders is not very serious about imitating Denmark. Denmark has a large and expensive welfare state, which Senator Sanders envies. He doesn’t envy the other part of that handshake: Denmark pays for that large and expensive welfare state the only way that you can: with relatively high taxes on the middle class, whose members pay both high income taxes and a value-added tax. If Senator Sanders were an intellectually honest man, he’d acknowledge forthrightly that the only way to pay for generous benefits for the middle class is to tax the middle class, where most of the income earners are. Instead, he talks about taxing a handful of billionaires to pay for practically everything. Rhetorically, he’s already spent the entire holdings of the billionaire class many times over.

But Senator Sanders does not seem as if he thinks a great deal about these things. He worries about the size of the holdings of our largest banks (I’d bet a dollar that he could not explain the difference between an investment bank and a commercial bank) and frets that six big banks have assets equal to 65 percent of U.S. GDP. He does not consider that in Switzerland there are two banks whose combined assets are well more than twice Switzerland’s GDP, a reflection of the fact that the moneyed people and institutions of the world have a great deal of confidence in Swiss financial institutions, or that similar parties invest with American institutions for similar reasons. And never mind that Denmark’s largest bank has assets totaling 1.6 times Denmark’s GDP — a lot more than the 65 percent split among six banks in the United States that so troubles Sanders. Sanders’s line of thinking seems to go: “Bankers, money, evil, greedy, Make Them Pay!”

Democrats are positively delusional about this stuff, talking about Glass-Steagall as though not repealing it would have changed one thing about the way business was done at a pure-play investment bank such as Lehman Bros. or Bear Stearns. The policy is entirely unrelated to the problem, but neither the Democratic presidential candidates nor their voters understand the problem or the policy. They know only that Copenhagen is lovely, and people like Senator Sanders enjoy citing its “example” while shouting such nonsensical sentences as “Free health care is a right!” …

Our progressive friends argued that Obamacare is just like the Swiss health-care system, which is generally quite highly regarded, and it is, with one important difference: Switzerland is full of Swiss people and the United States is not. The Swiss health-care system turns out to be poorly suited for a country that isn’t Swiss. Any bets on how well the Danish welfare state is going to play in Mississippi and New Jersey?

Progressives who imagine that Americans are one election away from getting to Denmark do not understand Denmark, or America, or much of anything.

Then there’s Hillary Clinton, caught by Charles C.W. Cooke saying …

Asked last night to name “enemies” of which she was “proud,” Hillary Clinton rattled off a list that included “Republicans.”

I haven’t seen a great deal of discussion about this in the aftermath of the debate, and I must say that I’m slightly surprised about that. It’s one thing to say you’re proud that, say, the NRA is your enemy; you can always explain that you respect gun owners and the Second Amendment but oppose the “crazies.” But the other majority political party in the country? The party for which almost half of voters pull the lever? That’s not smart.

Why not? Well, because it opens you up to an obvious attack. When Clinton said it, I could just hear Marco Rubio saying this in a presidential debate:

Secretary Clinton, you said during the primaries that your biggest enemy was “Republicans.” I think that your comment provides the voters with a perfect example of how we differ. I’m a Republican, and, on some of the issues at least, I have some disagreements with the Democratic party. But it is not my enemy. Those who vote for it aren’t my enemies. They’re my neighbors, my colleagues, my friends, the men and women who teach my children, the people I see every day all around my state. On November 8th of this year, I will be asking all Americans for their votes — Democrats, Republicans, independents, everybody. For far too long now we’ve had a political class that refuses to work together; that draws lines around itself based upon its party affiliation; that forgets why it was sent to serve. I want to end that. I want to lead this country into the future as the president of everybody — even those who aren’t sure about me. If you believe that half of the country is your enemy — if you believe that a majority of the people you’ll have to work with are your enemy — you won’t be able to do that. I will.

Is that largely saccharine nonsense? Probably, yes. But don’t underestimate just how well it connects (see: Obama, Barack).

To watch how quickly debate viewers turn off when candidates start attacking one another is to understand how keenly most voters think of themselves as being above the fray. Sure, the line may have endeared Hillary to the crowd last night. But if she’s going to run as an out and out partisan who regards the other side as a nuisance that needs destroying, she’s opening herself up to profitable attack.

That assumes, of course, that other Democrats also do not view Republicans as not opponents, but as enemies.

Clinton continues to show all the negatives of both Bill  Clinton and Barack Obama, and none of the positives. Which doesn’t mean she didn’t win the debate, but new Facebook Friend Ron Fournier warns her:

Hil­lary Clin­ton won. She won be­cause she’s a strong de­bater. She won be­cause Bernie Sanders is not. She won be­cause the first Demo­crat­ic pres­id­en­tial de­bate fo­cused on lib­er­al policies—and not her email scan­dal or char­ac­ter.

The em­battled front-run­ner won her­self a news cycle or two, be­cause she stretched the truth and played to a friendly audi­ence. It won’t al­ways be so. …

Pro­fes­sion­al Demo­crats and the party’s strongest voters are cer­tainly tired of hear­ing about the email scan­dal, but it’s not go­ing to go away—not with the FBI in­vest­ig­at­ing wheth­er con­fid­en­tial in­form­a­tion was mis­handled un­der Clin­ton’s sys­tem and not with in­de­pend­ent voters los­ing faith in Clin­ton’s word.

Char­ac­ter and judg­ment are gate­way polit­ic­al is­sues. An un­trust­worthy can­did­ate might check all your policy boxes, might tickle your ideo­lo­gic­al but­tons, and might even grind away long enough to get your vote—but you’re not go­ing to like it.

That is Clin­ton’s prob­lem. Like it was in 2008, her char­ac­ter is the is­sue that threatens to con­sume all oth­ers.

The email scan­dal re­calls ques­tions about Clin­ton’s in­teg­rity that go back to the Rose Law Firm/White­wa­ter and the White House Travel Of­fice. Flip-flop­ping on the Trans-Pa­cific Part­ner­ship and the Key­stone XL pipeline add weight to the ar­gu­ment made by Demo­crats and Re­pub­lic­ans alike that Clin­ton is a mal­le­able op­por­tun­ist. …

“A ‘Can­cer’ on the Clin­ton Can­did­acy” by Politico’s Glenn Thrush and An­nie Karni climbs in­side the Clin­ton cam­paign to de­scribe a para­noid can­did­ate with me­diocre polit­ic­al skills re­fus­ing ad­vice of staff to come clean on the email is­sue. “We need to throw the facts to the dogs, and let ‘em chew on it,” seni­or ad­visor John Podesta re­portedly told the can­did­ate. In the deeply re­por­ted story based on in­ter­views with 50 ad­visers, donors, Demo­crat­ic op­er­at­ives, and friends, Clin­ton’s team ap­pears to throw her un­der the bus.

That’s cer­tainly how Bill and Hil­lary Clin­ton in­ter­preted the story, ac­cord­ing to three people who talked to them today. “They’re pissed,” said one.

“How to Beat Hil­lary Clin­ton” by the New York­er’s Ry­an Lizza, fea­tured an Oc­to­ber 2007 memo by aides to then-Sen. Barack Obama sig­nal­ing their suc­cess­ful char­ac­ter at­tack against Clin­ton. She “can’t be trus­ted or be­lieved”; “She’s driv­en by polit­ic­al cal­cu­la­tion”; “She em­bod­ies trench war­fare vs. Re­pub­lic­ans”; “She prides her­self on work­ing the sys­tem not chan­ging it.” …