Twenty-four Democrats (including former senator Mike Gravel) are making a real effort at getting on the debate stage, which means that four of them — perhaps the senior senator from Colorado, perhaps the mayor of America's largest city — will be declared less relevant than Marianne Williamson, a self-help author who lost a 2014 run for Congress and who has met both the donor and polling thresholds for the debates.

Few people are more irritated by this than Bennet, a serious-minded favorite of Washington editorial pages who could not believe what the race had turned into. ("I'm not going to get a haircut to get attention," he joked here, referring to a Beto O'Rourke clip that went viral in the wrong way.) His initial pitch, that his party risked going too far left and embracing "policy proposals that have no basis in reality," didn't seem to differ much from Joe Biden's. Demand Justice, founded last year to urge Democrats to reverse conservative appointments to the courts, ran ads in New Hampshire that asked why the senator voted for "67 percent" of the president's nominees.

The backlash has actually helped Bennet carve out a niche. If Biden is the pragmatist who wants to turn the clock back, Bennet is the pragmatist who says the clock is broken, smashed by right-wing Republicans in the House Freedom Caucus. While Biden refuses to speak ill of other Democrats, Bennet is happy to tell his intra-party critics that they're fools. The senator, whose low-key style can resemble a podcast played at 3/4 speed, would use his time on a debate stage to warn his party against disaster.

Take the issue of judges. Bennet's first problem with the "67 percent" attack is that it's wrong; to get to that number, he says, opponents added up his vote for one-third of contested Trump judicial nominees to his votes for the many unanimously confirmed nominees. The people criticizing him now, he says, were the ones who pushed Democrats to loosen filibuster rules in the first place, taking away the party's ability to block conservative judges. When they argue that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) would have blown up the rules anyway, as he did to prevent Barack Obama's final Supreme Court appointment, Bennet scoffs.