All Smiles

Why, Wolf asked, can't Hillary just admit her Iraq vote was a mistake? Hillary gave her usual answer about the inspectors. Barack gave his usual answer that this was a vote for war. And I had my usual feeling of d¿j¿ vu.

"I'm concerned about sex," Obama said--but the question was about seamy entertainment.

Can Hill control Bill? Hill laughed and said she is in charge.

There were just no sparks. (Debates have more energy when the candidates are standing.) The needle didn't move. If you liked Hillary or Obama going in, nothing happened, it seems to me, that changed your mind.

If they'd scratched each other a bit, maybe Blitzer wouldn't have closed by asking if they would run with each other. Personally, I don't think it will happen. But if only one of them had snarled and said, No way!

"They carefully framed their disagreements as small in comparison to their differences with Republicans," says the Chicago Tribune. "Each used some variation of the phrase "I agree" more than once.

"After weeks of fighting--in debates, in sound bites, by way of surrogates--Obama and Clinton seemed to have made a strategic calculation heading into Super Tuesday: Nice is better."

But there was one irreconcilable difference that had a back-to-the-future quality:

"The Iraq war reemerged Thursday as a dividing line between the two major Democrats remaining in the presidential contest, as Barack Obama used a Los Angeles debate to argue he has the judgment to lead the nation out of war and Hillary Rodham Clinton asserted that she has the gravitas to do the same," says the L.A. Times.

The paper says that "with the war again the focus, the race reverted to the campaign's purest distillation: Clinton's experience against Obama's judgment."

Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin zeroes in on that exchange:

"Clinton used the last showdown before Super Tuesday to trot out her familiar and false claim that her 2002 vote for the war was not really a vote for war. Everybody in the world knows the truth now, yet Clinton still can't admit it.