There were no real fireworks, no bitter exchanges between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in their Texas debate on Thursday night. You can probably make the argument that either one of them won on points, but no one came close to a knockout.
Clinton repeatedly tried to showcase her differences with Obama on a variety of subjects, mainly health care, saying his plan would not cover millions of Americans.
Obama responded by bringing up memories of then First Lady Hillary Clinton's failed health care effort in 1993, by saying he wouldn't do things in secret on the issue.
There weren't too many zingers - Clinton tried to zap Obama with a one-liner on the political plagiarism issue of whether Obama has been lifting lines from others to use in his stump speeches.
Clinton said of Obama, he represents "change you can Xerox."
I'm not sure it's going to be remembered for years as a line that skewered her opponent and changed the course of the Democratic race in 2008.
So where does this leave us? Clinton did what she had to do in terms of going after Obama without coming off as shrill or terribly negative.
At the same time, Obama never seemed to be under the gun. If you were looking for a bead of sweat going down the side of his face, I didn't notice anything of the sort.
There is one more debate next week in Ohio. We'll see if the pesky media latches onto anything from this debate, or if something bubbles up from the aftermath that might give the Clinton team a bit of momentum.
As for the polls in the key March 4th states of Ohio and Texas, two new ones from ABC News/Washington Post give Clinton a 50-43% lead in Ohio and a negligible 48-47% lead in Texas.
I'm really intrigued by polls from Texas over the past week, because they seem to have very few undecided voters. CNN had Clinton up 50-48 the other day in the Lone Star State.
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