I watched the 116th Democratic debate last night, since I have no life and it was not much of a crowd scene: Biden and Richardson have fallen from the fray and Kucinich was blocked due to lack of popularity. It must be hard being told you can’t sit at the same cafeteria table as the cool kids when you’ve got the hottest spouse of them all. (And yes, I include Bill in that.)

And yes, it was rather collegial as debates have gone; the boys did not gang up on Hillary and no one cried. In fact an embarrassing amount of time was spent early on talking about Hillary tearing up in NH and Obama’s “likeable enough” line in the last debate, to the point where my wife complained about insider baseball questions from interlocutors Brian Williams and Tim Russert. As you may have heard, both Clinton and Obama had already elected to play nice and avoid race issues and the whole question of who liked black people more, all of which was reminding people why they had gotten sick of Dems in the first place. An audience member, who heckled the moderators for their “race based” questions was escorted from the chambers. (My wife was allowed to stay.)

At the end of the two hour show, which was broadcast on the little-watched MSNBC opposite NBC’s own two-hour special edition of America’s Biggest Loser, Keith Olbermann declared the debate “substantial and substantive” and I had to agree: I could vote for any of these three. (MSNBC’s resident blowhard, Chris Matthews declared Hillary the victor and next president, reminding of me nothing more than the Fox commentators this past Sunday who warned at halftime, when the playoff game was tied 14-14, that there was no way the Giants could beat the Cowboys.)

I did worry, though: While I have made my affinity for Obama known, he may be too smart for the country. When he parsed the distance between a difference and a distinction in the answer to one question, I saw America collectively rolling its eyes. Hillary, whose husband defines modern political parsing, has a tendency to shout no matter what size the audience (prompting Williams to remind the candidates that he and Russert were only seven feet away from them) — and she talks too much. And Edwards’ populist politics come close to embracing protectionism, a dead end in my opinion, and by appealing to our concern for the underdog he overlooks the lessons of Reagan.

For Reagan, while mentioned in every GOP debate, is too often overlooked by the Dems. His was a message of hope, whether you bought it or not; he moved a lot of people and left our party in the wilderness (the same one the GOP wandered in after Goldwater) for years. I call it the lesson of the Russian cabdriver: I remember arguing with a Reagan-loving hack in LA in the eighties: He doesn’t care about you, I said, he only cares about the rich.

“Soon I will be rich!” this guy said. It’s the American dream, or one of them. “Here you can be anything.”

Call it coincidence but yesterday, on Brian Lehrer’s show on WNYC, I heard another Russian (this one from Brighton Beach) talking about Obama, whom he had gone to hear speak. He was suspicious; Hillary had been a friend to his community, and he clearly bought some of the rumors about Obama (he had been raised a Muslim etc.). But he liked the fact that the candidate talked about personal transformation; in his book, that wide-open immigrant’s book like the one the lady in the harbor holds, the personal trumped the political and America’s great promise was change.

There’s that word again.