Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders started the MSNBC debate in Durham, N.H. sparring over foreign policy and campaign finance reform, but ended the night on a friendly note. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post) 
 
 Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders squared off in the fifth Democratic presidential debate in New Hampshire on Thursday night. I watched, and picked some of the best and worst of the night. 
 
 Winners 
 
 * Hillary Clinton: This was not a debate in which Clinton scored a knockout blow. It was one, however, that she won on points. Clinton came out super aggressive in the debate's first 30 minutes, pushing Sanders back on his heels on, well, everything: guns, experience, the tenor of the campaign, what it means to be progressive and plenty of other things. 
 
 There are those who will see Clinton's tone in those first 30 minutes as over the top and, therefore, ineffective, but it seemed to me that she set up lots and lots of attacks that she can follow through on beyond New Hampshire. (Clinton made clear — at least to my eyes — that she understands the New Hampshire primary is a lost cause. More on that below.) 
 
 When the subject moved to foreign policy in the debate's second hour, Clinton was clearly more at ease than Sanders and effectively made the case that now isn't the time to put someone in the Oval Office who needs to learn on the job. 
 
 It was far from a perfect debate for Clinton. She struggled, again, to explain the speaking fees she took as a private citizen and pointedly refused the opportunity to release the transcripts of those speeches. Her response (or lack thereof) ensures the issue will linger. 
 
 * Two-person debates: There's a reason that networks try to limit the number of people on stage during these debates. This debate — the first one-on-one showdown of the 2016 primary season — proved that less is more in debates. The first hour was the best hour of any debate of this election: substantive, confrontational and entertaining. Both candidates had plenty of time to make their cases to voters and, more importantly, voters had a chance to get a deep look at what these two people believe and where they differ. 
 
 * Split screens: I am on the record as wanting a channel — online would be fine — that runs a split screen the entire time when the candidates are talking. If the NFL can have 20 different camera angles to watch every play, why can't I have this one little thing? I mean, if we could have more of this, why wouldn't you want it? 
 
 * Chuck Todd/Rachel Maddow: Moderating a debate for state Senate is hard. Moderating a presidential debate is really tough. Todd and Maddow did the thing that is both hardest and best for moderators at this level: They let the candidates actually debate. There is nothing that drives me crazier than when a moderator steps into the middle of a genuine conversation/disagreement between two (or more) candidates in order to move on to some other topic. The whole point of a debate is to figure out where the differences are and how each candidate explains those differences, not to try to see who can ask the most questions. Todd and Maddow got out of the way of the candidates tonight, which is exactly what good moderators should do. 
 
 Also, kudos to the duo for asking thoughtful questions that haven't been asked of the candidates a thousand times before; Todd's question to Sanders about why he wasn't taking public financing for the primary campaign was an A+. 
 
 Losers 
 
 * Bernie Sanders: I hesitate to put the Vermont socialist in the "loser" category because he did very little in the debate that will slow his momentum heading into a near-certain New Hampshire win. But I also hate when analysts and reporters take the easy way out when picking winners and losers. It was a two-person debate; if Clinton won then Sanders, by definition, didn't win. (This is the problem with using the binary choice of "winner" and "loser" to grade debates. But I digress.) 
 
 I thought Sanders was forceful and effective, as always, when talking about economic inequality and campaign finance reform. I thought he may have allowed himself to be put in a box as a single- or double-issue candidate down the line by Clinton, however. 
 
 Sanders also continued to struggle when the debate moved off of domestic issues and onto matters of foreign policy. On a question about what the right next steps were regarding American troops in Afghanistan, Sanders's answer was rambling and generally nonsensical. 
 
 * New Hampshire: Clinton pledged repeatedly to fight for every vote in New Hampshire. But if you read between the lines of some of her statements, it was clear that she understands that the Granite State primary is probably already over. Her first big attack on Sanders was on his alleged lack of commitment to gun control, including votes against the Brady Bill. That attack won't play well in New Hampshire, a Second Amendment-friendly state, and Clinton knows it. But she also knows that among Democrats nationally, being the candidate regarded as more liberal on gun control is a good place to be. 
 
 Clinton's decision to travel to Flint, Mich. — announced just before the debate — just 48 hours before the New Hampshire vote is another signal that she has her eye beyond the Granite State already. New Hampshire, which fashions itself the picker of presidents (or at least presidential nominees), almost certainly won't get the attention it has in past primary fights. 
 
 * Democratic National Committee: Remind me again why (a) there weren't more debates on the primary calendar initially and (b) those that were scheduled were put at times when no one would watch them? 
 
 * Time: I initially had the 90-minute debate length in the "winners" column because that felt like plenty of time for the two candidates to hash out their differences and for us all to go to bed at a reasonable hour. I moved it to the "losers" column when the debate went beyond its scheduled 10:30 p.m. Eastern end time. Then past 10:45 p.m. Then past 11 p.m. Come on man. What we doing out there, man? ||||| Story highlights Tim Stanley: On style, command of foreign policy, Hillary Clinton won debate, but Sanders won on the substance of his one really good issue: money in politics 
 
 He says Clinton left impression on issue of hefty speakers fees that she's too tied to Wall Street-- a weakness that plays to Sanders' strength 
 
 Timothy Stanley, a conservative, is a historian and columnist for Britain's Daily Telegraph. He is the author of "Citizen Hollywood: How the Collaboration Between L.A. and D.C. Revolutionized American Politics." The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. 
 
 (CNN) What a great debate. Bernie Sanders vs. Hillary Clinton is turning into a genuine philosophical contest -- between the senator's populist radicalism and the Secretary of State's gradualist reformism. The policy difference is narrow but the approach to politics is hugely different. 
 
 On style, many viewers will judge that Clinton won the faceoff in Durham, New Hampshire. She was certainly, to borrow a Trumpism, "high energy." She artfully shot down Sanders' attacks on her progressivism and quite convincingly displayed her knowledge of foreign policy. 
 
 Timothy Stanley 
 
 On the latter subject, Sanders suddenly seemed parochial and out of his depth. He should've dismissed a silly invitation to rank various regimes in order of evilness. Instead he gave a halting description of North Korea that suggested he was trying to visualize it on a map. At times, it sounded like he only has one issue. Happily for him, it's a darn good issue. 
 
 An undecided voter who watched the debate had to come away with the impression that Clinton is the handmaiden of Wall Street. Sanders hit the subject of money in politics so hard and so convincingly that even this conservative viewer was punching the air with a clenched fist. 
 
 We know that liberal legislation gets killed because of Wall Street lobbying. We know that Clinton takes a lot of money from Wall Street -- she was paid $675,000 from Goldman Sachs just for delivering three speeches. So it's reasonable to infer that Clinton is at the epicenter of the economic forces stopping social change. 
 
 Read More ||||| The fifth 2016 Democratic presidential primary debate marked the first time Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton faced each other one on one. 
 
 The February 4 debate was also the first one after the Iowa caucuses, which saw Sanders and Clinton fight to a draw, and the last before the New Hampshire primary, where Sanders is expected to beat Clinton handily. It finds Clinton at perhaps her weakest moment in the campaign so far, with no clear victories to date, defeat imminent, and a growing and impassioned movement backing her opponent. 
 
 It'll take a few days for poll results to trickle in, which will provide the closest thing to an objective answer of who actually won the debate. But in the meantime, here are the candidates who ended the night better off than they started it — and the ones who slipped. 
 
 Winner: Bernie Sanders 
 
 Justin Sullivan/Getty Images I gotta tell ya, the Koch brothers, they're bad eggs. 
 
 No one is more on message than Bernie Sanders. No matter the context, no matter the topic under discussion, Sanders is uncannily good at changing the conversation to his preferred topics: inequality, the political power of banks, and the corrosive effect of corporate money on politics. 
 
 At times that can make him sound like he's missing the point. But when those are the actual topics under discussion, it makes him an incredibly disciplined, well-prepared debaters. And for at least the first half of the debate, the topics were all ones he was designed to do well on. 
 
 A huge chunk of the debate was devoted to discussing Wall Street reform, which gave Sanders a great opportunity not just to showcase his support for very ostentatiously tough anti–Wall Street regulations — like separating commercial and investment banking — but to bring up Clinton's longstanding ties to the financial industry, and especially her acceptance of $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs. 
 
 He was also given an extended platform to trumpet his single-payer health care plan, which, whatever problems it may have, is a more inspiring talking point than Clinton's "let's just not do health care again" position. The very nature of the discussion on domestic policy forced Clinton to acknowledge, without Sanders's help, that she's offering voters less. 
 
 "I also believe in affordable college," she said. "But I don't believe in free college because every expert that I have talked to says, look, how will you ever control the costs." That may be a sensible assessment of the policy problem, but it doesn't fare well next to Sanders's promises that we can too dramatically expand access to higher education. 
 
 Sanders also got multiple chances to disavow interest in non-substantive procedural controversies involving the Clinton campaign. He doesn't care about her emails, he reiterated, but he also pooh-poohed concerns about irregularities in the Iowa caucuses, which many online Sanders supporters have argued gave Clinton an unfair, narrow victory there. 
 
 Sanders sensibly pointed out that he only got a couple fewer delegates out of Iowa, and that who actually got first largely doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. It bolstered his image as a different kind of politician, without patience for cable news mini controversies and an unerring focus on the actual big problems: inequality, stagnant wages, and the rich's domination of the political process. 
 
 Winner: Hillary Clinton 
 
 Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 
 
 Okay, I know this sounds dumb, but hear me out. On some level, the Democratic primary process is now zero-sum, with any gains to Sanders hurting Clinton and vice versa. And that's true in a narrow sense. But both candidates gave very strong performances that emphasized their respective strengths. Regardless of who won in relative terms, both clearly succeeded in making the most compelling case for their respective candidacies. 
 
 For Clinton, that meant giving her strongest performance to date on foreign policy. She's still well to the right of the Democratic Party as a whole on these questions. But she also is actually well-versed in them, whereas Sanders's comments on foreign policy appear limited to a) praising the foreign policy achievements of the Obama administration, and b) hammering Clinton for her vote for the Iraq War. 
 
 The latter remains Clinton's biggest weakness. It's unclear why she can't simply say, "It was a huge mistake, I've rethought my views on the use of force and learned from my mistake," but in lieu of that kind of fully honest reckoning, her burn at Sanders — "A vote in 2002 is not a plan to defeat ISIS" — was rhetorically effective if not particularly reassuring to more dovish Democrats. It turned the conversation from being about her positions on the issue toward Sanders's near-total ignorance of it. 
 
 Reasonable people can differ on how important Sanders's disinterest in the issue is, but insofar as it matters, the fact that he appeared clearly out of his element wasn't particularly helpful. When Chuck Todd asked him why he hadn't laid out his foreign policy philosophy, Sanders didn't reply, "Because that's an empty campaign season ritual that doesn't actually matter." He claimed a mostly unrelated speech about socialism counted. 
 
 That's really weak sauce when trying to defend your credentials against a former secretary of state, who, for better or worse was pretty clear about what she'd do about ISIS: "I am against American combat troops being in Syria and Iraq. I support special forces and the air campaign." Sanders failed to lay out any way in which his ISIS policy would differ from hers, and his comments on Iran were mostly devoted to insisting they didn't disagree on how to deal with the country. 
 
 Sanders clearly won on domestic policy. Clinton clearly won on foreign policy. And both gave excellent performances that offered compelling substantive grounds for supporting them. It feels perverse to label either a loser. 
 
 Loser: Debbie Wasserman Schultz 
 
 Andrew Burton/Getty Images DWS. 
 
 Tonight's debate wasn't even supposed to happen. It was not on the original list of six approved by the Democratic National Committee and its chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. But then NBC and the Union Leader — New Hampshire's biggest newspaper — agreed to hold one even without the DNC's go-ahead, Clinton signed on, and Sanders signed on and got Clinton to commit to three additional debates. And so it was that a Democratic debate was scheduled for 9 o'clock on a Thursday night ahead of the earliest primary, perhaps the best possible time for maximum viewership. 
 
 That was definitely not the strategy behind the DNC's pre-approved debate schedule. Recall that the last debate was held on the Sunday night before Martin Luther King Jr. Day. While Wasserman Schultz insisted that it was timed to "maximize the opportunity for voters to see our candidates," basically no one believed her. Networks generally don't save their most promising shows for the night before a federal holiday. The intention was clearly to decrease viewership and — to be a bit cynical about it — limit Sanders's opportunities to damage Clinton. 
 
 Tonight's debate was evidence that failed. The demand for more debates was too high, and eventually both candidates gave in to it, making the DNC appear utterly feckless, with not even Clinton there to back it up. The party leadership has lost control of the debate process entirely, which is a loss both for the organization and for Wasserman Schultz's odds of continuing to lead it in the medium run. 
 
 Loser: Wall Street 
 
 Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images Wall Street finally lost something for once. 
 
 There was a time, not so long ago, in which left parties — not just the Democrats but the British Labour Party as well — made conscious alliances with the financial sector. Banks were singled out from the rest of "big business" and provided a durable base of party funds, while Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in turn adopted remarkably finance-friendly deregulatory agendas. 
 
 It wasn't a straightforward quid pro quo (many Democrats thought banks were just less insidious than other companies on the merits), but it definitely resulted in a broad, bipartisan pro-bank consensus on both sides of the pond. 
 
 Those alliances were threatened by the 2008 financial crisis, and especially following the passage of Dodd-Frank in 2010, the financial sector has become more consciously right-wing, and the tilt of its donations has turned toward the Republicans. Partially because of a Democratic reorientation toward donations from the tech sector and Hollywood, and partially because of enduring outrage from the crisis, the Democratic Party has in turn become more stridently anti–Wall Street. 
 
 The financial sector's best hope of stopping this process was nominating Hillary Clinton. She literally represented Wall Street during her time as the senator from New York, and her core of economic advisers is centered on Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs/Citigroup chairman. As recently as November, she was defending her pro–Wall Street votes by invoking 9/11. 
 
 But tonight, her defense was different. It wasn't, "Actually banks are good." It was, "Sure, I take their money, but I will still gut them like fish": 
 
 I called to end the loopholes that hedge fund managers enjoy. I called for a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau before it was created. I think the best evidence that the Wall Street people, at least know, where I stand and where I have always stood is because they are trying to beat me in this primary. … We have a law. It was passed. It was signed by President Obama. It lays out a process that you go through to determine whether a systemic risk is posed. By the way, President Obama signed that, pushed it through, even though he took donations from Wall Street, because he's a responsible president. 
 
 Whether or not you buy her explanation for Republicans attempting to help Sanders — I think it's less that they're scared of her views and more that they think Sanders is hopeless in the general election — the message here is clear. To paraphrase Jesse Unruh, she can take Wall Street's money and still tell them to fuck themselves. And her comprehensive Wall Street reform plan suggests she has some credibility here. 
 
 If you were a financial executive watching tonight, you'd still leave less scared of Clinton than of Sanders. But you'd leave convinced that another Democratic administration will entail a world of hurt for Wall Street. 
 
 Loser: Doves 
 
 Shutterstock Doves, in happier times. 
 
 It's curious that Bernie Sanders is so completely apathetic about foreign policy, since it's arguably the issue where Clinton is most vulnerable. Sure, she's more experienced, and sure, she will all come across as more knowledgable, but she's also genuinely to the right of the Democratic Party as a whole when it comes to matters of war and peace. 
 
 There's space for a challenger to make the argument that Barack Obama made in 2008: She's too quick to go to war. The Libya intervention in 2011 was a mistake. So were her calls to intervene early against Bashar al-Assad in Syria. So was her hawkish rhetoric toward Iran, which arguably made life worse for Americans held there. She has clearly not learned the right lesson from Iraq, and she'd repeat her 2002 mistake by launching yet more ill-advised wars as commander in chief. 
 
 Sanders is not making this case. He's invoking the war vote, sure, but more as a thumb in Clinton's eye than as a pivot to explaining why a Sanders presidency would be different and less bellicose. That's largely because it probably wouldn't be that much less bellicose. Sanders's plans for ISIS and Afghanistan are basically identical to Clinton's. He supports the drone war. 
 
 If Wall Street was left without allies in the Democratic field tonight, then so were genuine doves. Lincoln Chafee, the only Democratic candidate to make a straightforwardly antiwar case, was treated as a punchline and dropped out early. And with two candidates left, doves are completely without a champion. ||||| Photo 
 
 Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont debated one-on-one for the first time Thursday night, and the consensus among commentators and critics was that it was the most feisty, yet substantive, encounter to date. Most agreed that Mr. Sanders and Mrs. Clinton each won out on their respective strengths — Wall Street reform and foreign policy — with views divided on a true victor. 
 
 “The candidate that will gain from this zero-sum debate — the winner — will turn on something of an x-factor: did the undecided Democrats watching prefer Hillary Clinton’s direct, aggressive attacks on Bernie Sanders, most of them early in the night? Or did they prefer Sanders’ refusal to engage in any direct attacks? I thought Clinton was unfair.” — Conor Friedersdorf, writer for The Atlantic 
 
 “Powerful ending by Sanders. There’s an undeniable decency to him that you don’t often see at this level of American politics.” — Ezra Klein, founder of Vox.com 
 
 “Crucial distinction between Bernie and Hillary on Flint: She suggests solutions, he demands punishments.” — Charlotte Alter, writer for Time 
 
 Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 “A weird advantage Sanders has in things like this: The naturalness in his interactions accentuates how Clinton struggles to seem at ease.” — Philip Bump, writer for The Washington Post’s blog “The Fix”
– Martin O'Malley may have been a more calming influence than he knew: Thursday night's Democratic debate was the first with just Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders on the stage, and analysts agree that it was the fiercest debate yet, with heated exchanges over issues like the meaning of "progressive." There's no clear consensus on who won, but here's what the analysts have to say: Clinton started off aggressively and "won on points," Chris Cillizza writes at the Washington Post. When it came to foreign policy, she "effectively made the case that now isn't the time to put someone in the Oval Office who needs to learn on the job," he writes, and while Sanders was "forceful and effective" on issues like economic inequality, Clinton may now be able to portray him "as a single or double issue candidate." Bernie Sanders was the winner, according to Dylan Matthews at Vox, who says the senator's relentless focus on "inequality, the political power of banks, and the corrosive effect of corporate money on politics" made him an incredible debater when those subjects came up. But Matthews says Clinton was also the winner, thanks to "her strongest performance to date on foreign policy." Clinton was "high energy" and "artfully shot down Sanders' attacks on her progressivism," but Sanders "hit the subject of money in politics so hard and so convincingly that even this conservative viewer was punching the air with a clenched fist," writes Timothy Stanley at CNN, concluding that Clinton "probably won the debate on style—but Sanders won on substance." Many commentators decided that each candidate had won on their own strength, with Clinton prevailing on foreign policy and Sanders ahead on issues like Wall Street reform, the New York Times notes. "Now if they could just split the gig—Bernie would cover domestic, Hillary on foreign policy," tweeted Mia Farrow. Click for some of the debate's biggest lines.