The seven viable Democratic candidates met in ‘Sin City’ to debate on Thursday evening, and the famous Las Vegas marketing slogan certainly applies to their performances: ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.’

 
The candidates all rolled the dice – some lost, some won, and some broke even. The state of Nevada depends heavily on revenue from gambling losers, but not much was garnered from this lukewarm field of presidential candidates. Unlike the last Democratic contest, little movement was achieved in this debate, and it’s still evident that true conservatives would find no alternative in the Democratic field. 

 
What will ‘stay’ in Vegas? In this case, Barack Obama’s presidential run. Anything he gained from the last Democratic debate is lying on the floor of the auditorium at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), and his presidential candidacy has regained the limbo that it was suffering from just two weeks ago.

 
Hillary Clinton displayed all the coolness and calm that previously earned her a 30% lead in national polls over her rivals, and Thursday’s debate was just another episode of ‘coronation of the queen’ that had been so prevalent in the first six months of the campaign. She quickly defused the ‘heat’ she received in the last debate by saying that her “pantsuit was made of asbestos,” then demurely accepted that her rivals were going to drop bombs on her – but this time, she wasn’t going to let them explode. 

 
The distinction between the top-tier candidates was achieved in one basic line of questioning posed by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who offered a simple choice between saying ‘I support licenses for illegal aliens, or I don’t.’ Obama was given two chances to give a yes or no answer and wouldn’t do it, while Clinton took her turn by responding in one word. “No.”

 
Whether or not you believe her is an entirely different question, especially based on her contradictory answers from two weeks ago and throughout the campaign. But the effect was dramatic. Obama now comes off as the political waffler, and Clinton looks like a leader.

 
It didn’t matter that the balance of Hillary’s answers weren’t specific or as ‘meaty’ as we would like – she’s got her husband’s gift for political ambiguity, and she can sound as if she knows what she’s talking about, trying to appeal to all people. And her makeup makes her look about twenty years younger.

 
Similarly, John Edwards lost big at the ‘craps’ tables – his usual attempts to set distance between Hillary and himself weren’t effective, and he even received boos from the audience during the opening sequence whenever he spoke out against Clinton. Edwards said “we need a president we can trust,” as if we could ever trust a slick looking trial lawyer who pleads for the poor and lives like a king.

 
He cited a statistic – that 35 million people ‘went hungry’ last year in America. 35 million people? It almost makes you believe that you can't drive through an economically challenged area without encountering a population of sunken-eyed and malnourished refugee camp survivors, instead of the obviously well-fed poor in this country. Hunger isn’t an issue that a candidate can hang his hat on in America – but obesity sure is a problem.

 
No wonder the people booed him. I bet people were chiming in at home as well.

 
The Nevada audience was decidedly pro-Clinton, which makes you wonder what political tricks that ‘Billary’ played in order to motivate people to vocally heckle any criticism of the candidate. Clinton was back to her old tricks, playing the gender card and deflecting criticism like light off the Luxor pyramid – nothing could touch her. 

 
For its part, CNN tried to make this debate different from the rest. The program began with a ‘photo op’ for the photographers surrounding the stage, and then when the questioning began, there weren’t any loud bells or red lights to cut off the candidates in mid-answer. 

 
But that backfired in some ways – when you have seven politicians on stage and ask them to adhere to the ‘honor system’ in order to cut themselves off, it doesn’t often work. Obama and Edwards were the worst offenders, as might be expected from the candidates who thought they stood to gain the most from pontificating beyond the allotted time.

 
And because of the question/topic/response format, it often seemed like large chunks of time would go by without hearing from certain candidates. The ‘big three’ dominated the opening sequence, minimizing the others and narrowing the field to three candidates. Then a question would arise, and in an attempt to be fair, the ‘minor’ candidates seemed to get all the time. The debate was somewhat uneven.

 
To CNN’s credit, Wolf Blitzer, Campbell Brown and John Roberts asked some good questions, and tried to keep the debate on track. The final third of the program involved questions from supposedly ‘undecided’ Democrats – and the contest seemed to lose focus. 

 
A promising beginning

 
As alluded to above, somewhat surprisingly, the debate’s first fifteen minutes were better than expected. Blitzer began with a series of questions concerning ‘attack’ statements against Clinton, and the pace was fast and furious.

 
It was ‘fight night in Vegas’ with numerous body blows landed against Clinton, and you almost got the impression that she was on the ropes, just about ready to go down. The CNN cameras focused on Obama’s glare as Hillary was ‘countering’ one of his answers, and you couldn’t help but think ‘if looks could kill…’ It was getting good.

 
Clinton’s smirks were also widely represented. The facial expressions between the three were priceless – it certainly appears like Clinton, Obama and Edwards don’t really like each other anymore.

 
But then the confrontation just ‘died’ about 20 minutes into the debate, when the candidates settled down to playing nice without directly going after anyone else. Joe Biden said “the American people don’t care about the stuff on this stage,” (I presume he meant the bickering) and immediately the tension subsided.

 
Biden is always the most confident, funny, consistent candidate. An outside observer would wonder why he’s not doing better, but the Democratic Party voters seem to have already decided that it’s the ‘big three,’ and there’s no sign that any of the lower-tier Democrats are going to break out.

 
Winners and Losers

 
As discussed above, Hillary Clinton was the clear winner in this debate, and Barack Obama the obvious loser. John Edwards was tucked all the way to one side on the stage, and that helped minimize the damage against him. But with Hillary and Obama glaring at each other, there could only be one of them that would emerge, and it wasn’t the tall man from Illinois.

 
The other ‘losers’ were the lower-tier candidates. This late in the contest, if you don’t make an impression, people are just going to stop paying attention to you and focus on the leaders.

 
Bill Richardson continues to work on his ‘nice guy’ Vice Presidential image, and seems to be running further and further to the left. He seemed proud of signing a bill that granted illegal aliens driver’s licenses, claiming that it’s a ‘public safety’ issue. Public safety, is he serious? 

 
He also said, when discussing the situation in Pakistan, that ‘human rights’ was more important than US national security! Wow, that’s going to win him a lot of votes. The Hollywood crowd that would buy into such a statement is already supporting Obama and Clinton, so you wonder what he hopes to gain from being so wishy-washy.

 
If he’s chosen for the eventual victor’s running mate, that’s one statement he’ll live to regret.

 
Joe Biden wasn’t really a ‘loser’ in the debate as much as he wasn’t much of a factor. He cracked several funny lines about the ‘three who get to talk,’ but there isn’t a single issue that he’s closely identified with. Foreign policy might be his best area, but I don’t think the average American voter identifies him as an expert in the area. He’s just kind of ‘invisible’ up there, save for his occasional thunderous explosions when given an opportunity to talk about something where he can drop some names.

 
Chris Dodd is emerging as the wise old owl of the group, silver hair and all, and when compared to the others on stage, seems to be someone you could imagine seeing on TV for four years. But he also reeks of northeast liberalism, and like Biden, lacks any kind of defining characteristics. He sounds credible on most issues, but there’s no consensus on where he stands.

 
For better or worse, you know Hillary because she’s the former First Lady, and she’s a woman. You know Obama because he’s the articulate black man. You know Edwards because he’s the Huckleberry trial lawyer with the pretty boy looks. Heck, you even know Dennis Kucinich, because he’s the nut of the group. But Dodd just ‘isn’t there’ when thrown in with the rest.

 
Dennis Kucinich? He needs Mike Gravel to come back to these debates to give him a companion on the kook fringe. Like Biden, Kucinich often says funny things, though with him, you’re not sure if you’re laughing with him or at him. His defining moment in this debate was when he stated, several times, that Bush and Cheney should be impeached immediately.

 
That’s a debate for another time, but if he had any common sense he’d realize that the best shot the Democrats have to win in ’08 is to keep Bush and Cheney precisely where they are. Kucinich is a flat out joke, unworthy of copy space.

 
Other observations and summing it up

 
Towards the end of the debate, the candidates were finally asked a question about abortion, where all of them were all too happy to claim that there was no way on God’s earth that the unborn were going to receive any protection from them! They didn’t exactly say it that way, but that’s the gist.

 
The original question had to do with appointing Supreme Court justices, and litmus tests.

 
Democrats have an astonishingly hard time mentioning ‘abortion,’ with all of them going out of their way to substitute the ‘right to privacy’ for the a-word. The Republicans can at least debate the issue, whereas these mindless Democratic robots are so enslaved to the ‘choice’ constituency that they dare not speak in favor of the Constitution, which at last check, doesn’t even contain the word ‘privacy.’

 
It’s a shame that the conservative movement can’t seem to get behind one candidate, and it’s even a bigger shame that the Republican Party can’t produce a principled conservative for folks to support – but it’s also clear that these Democrats are wholly unacceptable for anyone who believes in conservative causes, and the pro-life issue is just one of many where there’s no common ground with these folks.

 
It’s also clear that all the Democratic candidates believe that government must not only play a role in society, but must control society in order to enforce fair outcomes. Freedom isn’t a word that means much to them, except when it comes to choosing to terminate pregnancies, or claiming that ‘human rights’ trumps American security.

 
And while it’s entertaining to watch them discuss the issues, we’re all going to have to get used to the idea that we’ll be seeing a lot of one of them in the coming year. It’s highly unlikely that all those months will reveal anything about that one person that will ease the ‘pain’ of seeing him or her on the ballot, either.