Clinton shows why she’s the frontrunner — and what could bring her down

Hillary Clinton’s worst enemy is Hillary Clinton, and the first few

minutes ofSaturday night’s Democratic debate seemed to prove it. Her early answers were meandering and her delivery was flat. She spent a useless paragraph on the Sanders campaign data breach when a simple “This shouldn’t be a big issue; let’s move on” would have sufficed. As she started describing her strategy for Iraq and Syria, she ran through bullet points as though she were describing a bland powerpoint presentation that only she could see. Comfortably ahead in the polls, she seemed to assume the result of the Democratic primaries by stressing her differences with Republicans rather than those on stage. Her early performance portended a return of the over-cautious, self-defeating Hillary Clinton whose campaign choked in 2008.

Then she woke up. As the moderators pressed the candidates on the specifics of their plans, Clinton, finally off script, spoke more forcefully and with the sort of detail one would expect from a former secretary of state:

I believe if we lead an air coalition…if we continue to build back up the Iraqi army, which has had some recent success in Ramadi, if we get back talking to the tribal sheiks in Anbar to try to rebuild those relationships, which were very successful, in going after Al Qaeda in Iraq, if we get the Turks to pay more attention to ISIS than they’re paying to the Kurds, if we do put together the kind of coalition with the specific tasks that I am outlining, I think we can be successful in destroying ISIS.

Later, as she defended American action in the world, she offered the best explanation to date for why she supported intervening in Libya, insisting that “if we had not joined with our European partners and our Arab partners to assist the people in Libya, you would be looking at Syria.” Though U.S. intervention can lead to power vacuums in dangerous places, she argued that so can the lack of it.

She was also funny at times, signing off with, “May the force be with you,” which was pretty much perfect.

Clinton opened herself to several substantive criticisms, too. She would not say what she would do if her strategy for Iraq and Syria did not work. She focused on how Donald Trump’s odious anti-Muslim nonsense is outside the nation’s security interests, when it is at least as important that Trump’s proposals are intrinsically wrong. She stressed that she did not understand the encryption technology at the center of a debate about privacy and law enforcement data access, which was not reassuring. And Libya looks more and more like Syria every day.

But these flaws were small relative to those in the problem-riddled plans from her rivals, not to mention the magic-button-dependent foreign policy suggestions coming from the GOP side. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley spoke up a lot on Saturday night, but often to promise everything to everyone. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) stressed that he would build and rely on an Arab coalition to combat the Islamic State on the ground. And if Arab nations refuse? “My plan is to make it work, to tell Saudi Arabia that instead of going to war in Yemen, they, one of the wealthiest countries on Earth, are going to have to go to war against ISIS.” They are going to have to? Good luck making that order stick.

Moreover, even as Sanders stressed the importance of building an international coalition to defeat ISIS, he bragged about voting against the first Gulf War, a prime example of combining a relatively modest goal — defending Kuwait, not unseating Saddam Hussein — with a broad coalition, which is the sort of thing he claims to want.

Clinton’s slow start gave her rivals a chance to assert themselves. But she rallied and won the night.

source: washingtonpost