The third Democratic presidential primary debate, buried deep in the bowels of ABC's weekend television line-up, delivered little in the way of headlines. But for Hillary Clinton, the event generated good news: Three wins in a row against her competitors, coupled with an increasing sense that come next fall, she will be a formidable opponent on the main debate stage.
Clinton has long been a talented debater -- in 2008, she was consistently better than Barack Obama, though in the final analysis that superiority did not pay off at the ballot box. What she has demonstrated in the current election cycle is an even higher degree of fluidity in this most singular of political communication formats. Her performance in Saturday night's debate in New Hampshire should give pause to her would-be Republican rivals. This is a woman who knows how to debate.
It's not just her command of the material or her ease in the spotlight that makes Hillary Clinton a solid debater. It is her apprehension of the particular requirements of this milieu. Too many candidates fail to perceive that debating is not the same as giving a speech, or fielding questions in a press conference, or interacting with voters in a town hall. Debates have their own demands, their own folkways. Although each event is distinct from the next, at bottom electoral debates function as a clearly defined television genre, a genre that necessitates certain behavior from its participants.
Consider Clinton's ability to modulate her delivery over the course of the ABC debate. In this case, the candidates -- not to mention the audience -- were subjected to a program that clocked in at two and a half very long hours. As the minutes ticked by, Clinton displayed a range of performing modes: aggressive and amiable, serious and funny, scripted and spontaneous. She correctly intuited that no performer can stand on a stage for two and half hours without offering viewers some measure of variety: tempo changes, tonal shifts, gradations in the color palette.
Compare this flexibility of approach with her two competitors on the stage, Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley. Except for rare moments, Sanders delivers everything in the same relentless honk, as though he has swallowed a loudspeaker. His debate demeanor is exactly the same as his demeanor in rallies, even though the context could not be more different. Because he so rarely fluctuates, Sanders gives the audience little reason to lean in and listen for the unexpected.
O'Malley, over-caffeinated in this debate, came off as borderline obnoxious in his determination to be a player. Aggressiveness in debates is not in itself inappropriate, but too much aggression smacks of desperation. Both stylistically and rhetorically, O'Malley falls into a rut of predictability--over-relying, for instance, on anecdotes to illuminate abstractions. Every single person this man meets, apparently, embodies a political issue to be made hay of on the debate stage.
And then there are the Republicans. With the notable exception of Marco Rubio, this year's crop of GOP debaters is an essentially one-dimensional field, at least in the presentational sense. Trump exudes bluster. Cruz exudes smarminess. Carson exudes narcolepsy. Bush exudes awkwardness. And so on. The Republican candidates, despite their larger numbers and more frequent debate appearances, are sorely lacking in the on-camera fluency that has become a Hillary Clinton hallmark.
In the ABC debate, as the second segment kicked off, Clinton was missing in action, her lectern conspicuously empty when the questioning began. Suddenly, as Bernie Sanders was about to answer, Clinton materialized from the darkened wings, strode onstage to the audience's applause, leaned into her microphone with a grin, and said, "Sorry." It was a nice little human moment, not terribly important in the great scheme of things, but symbolic of Clinton's understanding of debates as live, unscripted events that should be taken seriously, but not too seriously.
The final line of her closing statement -- "Thank you, good night, and may the force be with you" -- showed that Clinton also understands the value of the scripted moment. This ability to embrace the two disparate halves of televised debates -- choreography and spontaneity -- is something few candidates understand, much less bother to master. With each debate, Hillary Clinton is showing voters that as a practitioner of the art, the force is most definitely with her.