Hillary Clinton’s Second Debate Strategy: Pull Rank ("A debate strategy pays off.") (Hillary Group)

A prohibitive frontrunner in the current Democratic nomination polls, Hillary Clinton arrived at her second debate Saturday aiming to prove that she had another advantage over the two candidates standing next to her on stage: Rank.

Time and again, the former Secretary of State claimed superior knowledge and experience than Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley. She condescended regularly and dismissed casually. Her point, though she never it explicitly, seemed to be that they were just not playing in the same league....

At the end of the debate, CBS News moderator John Dickerson gave Clinton one more opportunity to make her point. He asked each of the candidates to name a crisis they had experienced in their life that prepared them for the presidency. “Well, there are so many, I don’t know where to start,” Clinton responded, before retelling the story of her advising President Obama in the decision to launch a mission to kill Osama bin Laden.

Her rivals could not match her. “I don’t think that there is a crisis at the state or local level that really you can point to and say, therefore, I am prepared for the sort of crises that any man or woman who is commander in chief of our country has to deal with,” O’Malley admitted.

Sanders, meanwhile, spoke about the challenge of negotiating a Veterans Administration reform bill with Republicans. But his was a tale of defeat as much as victory, an odd choice for a candidate promising revolution. “The crisis was I lost what I wanted,” he said. “But I had to stand up and come back and get the best that we could.”

And with that, the debate ended right where Clinton wanted it.

TIME: http://time.com/4113590/democratic-debate-hillary-clinton-strategy/?xid=tcoshare