Editorial: Front-runner unscathed

Saturday, Nov. 17, 2007 | 7:19 a.m.

Hillary Clinton entered Thursday night's Democratic presidential candidate debate in Las Vegas having been roughed up in a previous debate - her opponents said she waffled when answering a question on whether illegal immigrants should receive driver's licenses.

So there was considerable attention on whether the New York senator, the front-runner in the race, could bounce back from what many pundits saw as a lackluster performance in the Philadelphia debate.

Adding to the pressure on Clinton was that her two closest rivals in the polls, Sen. Barack Obama and John Edwards, have been intensifying their attacks on her daily with just a little over a month before the caucuses and primary voting begin.

If the other candidates thought they would find a weakness they could exploit in the debate here and gain some traction against Clinton, they came away disappointed. For most of the two-hour debate at UNLV's Cox Pavilion, which was televised by CNN, she handled questions with ease and instead put the rest of the field on the defensive.

For instance, when media panelist Campbell Brown said "... your campaign has accused this all-boys club, surrounding you onstage, of piling on with their attacks against you," Clinton had a nice, deft comeback. "People are not attacking me because I'm a woman," she said. "They're attacking me because I'm ahead."

Indeed, national polling shows her ahead of her rivals and a CNN poll of Democratic voters in Nevada, taken shortly before the debate, had Clinton with 51 percent to 23 percent for Obama and 11 percent for Edwards.

Time isn't on the side of Clinton's challengers. Iowa's caucus will be held Jan. 3, followed by New Hampshire's primary and then Nevada's caucus Jan. 19.

One debate performance isn't going to seal the deal for Clinton and guarantee her the Democratic nomination. But Clinton's strong showing in the Las Vegas debate has made it that much more difficult for her challengers to chip away at the support she has among undecided Democrats and then somehow translate it into support for their candidacies.