How the Paris attack changed the Democratic presidential debate

The debate started with a moment of silence.
 
That told you right away that the circumstances surrounding Saturday night’s Democratic presidential debate were different from the first one and from the four Republican versions.
 
The three candidates — former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley — took the stage in Des Moines, Iowa, barely 24 hours after the terrorist attacks in Paris. French police were saying some of the attackers still could be at large.
 
The specter of the violence being wrought by the Islamic State and how to respond to that clearly were going to be front and center, and CBS informed the candidates of that earlier on Saturday. The network decided to frontload the debate, intended to focus on the economy, with questions about terrorism, foreign policy and national security.
 
One of Sanders’ aides, according to reports, strenuously objected, saying these were not the debate terms the campaign had agreed to. It was a startling display of tone-deafness, given the circumstances, and not a strong endorsement for a commander-in-chief who would have to respond quickly to a rapidly changing world.
 
Neither Clinton nor O’Malley opposed the change. Clinton, in particular, is quite comfortable discussing foreign policy.
 
And their respective reactions played out in their opening statements. Clinton and O’Malley devoted the one minute allotted them to Paris and the threat of terrorism. Sanders split his time between that and his standard stump rationalization for why he’s running. (Yes, it’s the revolution.)
 
But the first round of questions, which lasted a half-hour and focused almost entirely on terrorism and the Middle East, featured battles of semantics and arguments about past votes but little disagreement on actual goals.
 
Sanders was a little more of the isolationist he’s always been, but all three basically favor a coalition of nations fighting the Islamic State with the United States playing an important role but not a go-it-alone role. And Clinton again showed how she differs from her former boss, President Barack Obama, by making clear that the terrorist group must be defeated, not merely contained.
 
What was striking was how quietly the audience listened throughout that discussion. Granted, there was no Donald Trump, no alternate theories of the pyramids, no eight-person scrum with candidates appealing to the many divisions in their one party all assembled in one hall. But it seemed as though the Drake University audience respected the somberness of the moment and the topic.
 
There would be applause later when the topics shifted. The audience loved Sanders’ blaring that health care is a right, not a privilege. They cheered wildly when O’Malley referred to “that immigrant-bashing carnival barker, Donald Trump.” And they went wild for Clinton when she responded to Sanders’ complaints about her Wall Street donors by noting that 60 percent of her contributors are women.
 
That was their sharpest point of disagreement. Sanders complained about Clinton’s big-money donors, Clinton said she wouldn’t be influenced by their contributions, and they’re all ready to break up bad-behaving big banks. But we’ve heard all that before.
 
And eventually they got to the kind of kumbaya moment only Democrats create — when Sanders said he once again was sick and tired of Clinton’s emails and Clinton gave Sanders credit for lighting a fire under Americans to get involved in the political process.
 
Enveloped in that glow, they moved on to the topic that most united them — Republicans. Clinton warned of “alarming things” being proposed on the other side. She noted that all three candidates on Saturday night’s stage support funding Planned Parenthood, and believe in climate change and equal pay for equal work, none of which she said are favored by Republicans.
 
The entire affair was well-behaved, rather orderly, and virtually free of any new facts, stances or opinions. And when it was over, the most alarming thing on many people’s brains might well have been that there are four more of these still to come.