They staged a Democratic presidential debate from Las Vegas on CNN on Tuesday night.
A reasonably substantive discussion broke out and nothing about the race changed except that the prevailing dynamic--or inertia, if you prefer--became more embedded.
"Well, I'm still here," Hillary Clinton said, and that was the story.
The Republicans have tried to destroy her but failed. She is alive, especially after this debate, which she won with a generous boost from her main rival.
So let me correct something: One thing changed.
Public awareness that Bernie Sanders is sick of hearing about Clinton's emails--as are a lot of people, I'd wager--was widely enhanced. That's because Bernie declared as much with typical conviction and brutal clarity.
That was the memorable line of the night --that Bernie is tired of all this racket about Hillary's "damn emails."
He managed at once to stand up for his main competition while enhancing his own growing and popular status as an uncommon politician.
By "uncommon" I mean averse to the all-too-formulaic personal attacks that come from political consultants' cookie cutters, drive partisan polarization and detract from the kind of urgent passion for policy that Sanders revels in as he rails against the cancerous rule of big money.
All five Democratic debaters came into the debate the way they left.
Clinton came in ahead in polls, except in New Hampshire, owing to her name and experience and intelligence and toughness, but widely viewed as not authentic or trustworthy or ... well, let us say particularly warm or easily engaging.
That's largely how she left--still ahead, maybe by a slightly widened margin; still experienced, still smart, still tough, still not the most inspirational or at-ease or charismatic of candidates.
Aware of that, she tried now and then to be personable and passionate and even funny, to appear at ease, and succeeded in moderate measure.
Her challenge was how to handle the likeable, positive and liberally heroic Sanders. Would she embrace him, ignore him or go after him as one who can't possibly accomplish the impractically bold agenda of his fiery rhetoric?
It turned out she went after him, but on something else--on the one example of his not being liberal enough.
It was tactical, which is Clinton's essence. It was designed for the invigorated liberal community that matters in this primary. It was in regard to a timely and perfectly chosen issue, that of guns, where, for whatever reason, Sanders has been unreliably leftist.
He voted five times against the Brady Bill and its waiting period on handguns. His best explanation is that Vermont, which he represents in the U.S. Senate, is a rural state and that coming from a rural state sensitizes him to the need to find consensus on gun issues.
Hillary didn't patronize him. She didn't dismiss him. She signaled to all Democrats that she takes him seriously, and that they should as well.
Sanders came into the debate as the lovable curmudgeon and avuncular and insurgent democratic socialist he is, one who says precisely what he thinks. And what he thinks is passionately contemptuous of what is an emerging oligarchy in America, meaning an economic and political favoritism for the elite rich, a callous disregard for the poor, and an abandonment of the vital and once-great middle class.
He simply thinks capitalism is not all that, which is not something you hear every day--or ever--in American politics.
There is a great freedom in electoral politics--if not likely victory--for someone running insurgently on unbridled passion for what he fervently believes. Bernie clearly relishes that freedom.
The other three candidates ... well, they came in irrelevant and left the same.
Martin O'Malley, the former mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland, and a credible sort, it seems, was the best of the irrelevant three. But he didn't "break out," to use the well-used phrase for his supposed challenge.
Lincoln Chafee and Jim Webb came in as men whose candidacies were utter mysteries, and departed as mysteriously as they entered.
Generally, the Democratic debate was not as entertaining in a pedestrian and low-brow sense as the two previous Republican debates.
That's because Clinton and Sanders are serious while Donald Trump and Ben Carson aren't.
Trump did a little live-tweeting during the Democratic event, of course. But he was outdone for outrageousness on social media--for once--by Our Boy Mike, meaning the tragically self-marginalized Huckabee.
Our former governor set the Internet afire with his tired and self-indulgent shtick, offering this Twitter highlight: "I trust Bernie Sanders with my tax dollars like I trust a North Korean chef with my Labrador."
The man needs his cable television show back.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 10/15/2015