A Turning Point for Hillary Clinton

David Remnick: “History may look back on the Las Vegas debate as the event that elevated Clinton the way that Barack Obama’s eloquent victory speech after the Iowa caucuses elevated him, nearly eight years ago. It might even be regarded as the moment when she boxed out Biden, raked away the underbrush of Mssrs. Chafee, Webb, and O’Malley, and made Sanders look less like a plausible contender than like a protest candidate who forced his opponent to grapple with a political system poisoned by the outsized influence of an American oligarchy comprising, as the Times has reported, a hundred and fifty-eight families.”

“One debate will not erase all of what many voters see as Clinton’s complications: the lingering perception of her sense of moneyed entitlement, her lawyerly slipperiness under questioning, the walled garden of her political circle, her interventionist reflexes, her belatedness on gay marriage, comprehensive immigration, and Wall Street reforms. But if Clinton was not flawless she and her debating partners managed one distinct achievement: they accentuated the chaos, the intellectual barrenness, and the general collapse of their rivals in the Republican Party.”