Jon Ralston wonders what might have been for Obama had he been a little quicker and more assertive in Thursday’s debate

Sunday, Nov. 18, 2007 | 1:15 a.m.

Imagine how different the stories would have read, the atmospherics would have been, and how the debate's rhythms would have changed had Barack Obama answered the driver's licenses for illegal immigrants question thusly:

"I thought they should have them when I was a state senator. I still believe it is a public safety issue and so do many law enforcement agencies. That may not be popular. That may not be politically correct. It may even cost me votes. But I would rather talk about more important issues such as defining amnesty and paths to citizenship. And, Wolf, when you get to Hillary, don't let her say yes or no; have her explain how she went from supporting Gov. Eliot Spitzer's plan to being against it in just two weeks."

Sen. Clinton would have been stuck and could not have given her Reaganesque (Nancy, that is) answer and just said no. But when given his chance early in the Las Vegas debate to show what his campaign supposedly is all about - principle over parsing - Obama looked as if he tried to thread the illegal immigration needle with a piece of rope.

Obama never recovered, Clinton was emboldened and the field fell back in line behind the front-runner. She truly seemed like a woman among boys.

Amid all the static - whining about the hall being stuffed with Clintonites, about CNN controlling the supposedly spontaneous questions and about Wolf Blitzer's obsession with binary answers - comes the near-unanimous decision by the chattering class (c'est moi, aussi) that Clinton won by not losing.

But the Democratic Party has yet to resolve the battle for its soul, as the litmus testers of the blogosphere wrestle with the pragmatists in the corporeal world. Is it winning at all costs because of what you can do with the victory, or what you sell by winning at all costs that could make the win so soulless?

Those are the questions that define the Clinton-Obama war for the party, with other less-relevant skirmishes characterized by John Edwards' animated but increasingly tiresome populism, Joe Biden's often beautiful, occasionally flaming eloquence, Dennis Kucinich's persistent, quirky truth-telling, Bill Richardson's sometimes dead-on, often demagogic rhetoric and Chris Dodd's intelligent and yet so-often marginalized positions.

Lost behind the headlines of Thursday's debate were a couple of exchanges that, if allowed to flower by Blitzer, might have changed the race's dynamic.

On health care, Clinton put Obama on defense when she declared, "His plan will leave 15 million Americans out."

Given the chance to respond, Obama did not deny his plan has a gap and instead accused Clinton of imposing a mandate she would not enforce, declaring, "she is not garnishing people's wages to make sure that they have it." Now that ought to win you some votes.

What if he had simply said something else? Such as: "We all want universal health care. Hillary knows that. Some get us there faster than others but we all want to cover everyone. The Republicans do not. The simple question for Hillary is why we should trust her to do it when the last time we put it in her hands, we lost control of Congress and gave the insurance companies the upper hand for a decade and a half."

But he didn't, so she didn't have to defend her ability to bring coalitions together, the seminal weakness of her campaign and the reason so many Republicans want to see her nominated.

On Social Security, Clinton waded into troubled waters when she insisted that lifting the tax cap would result in a $1 trillion tax increase. "I don't think we need to do that," she added.

Here, Obama pounced and pointed out that only 6 percent of Americans make more than $97,000 a year. "So 6 percent is not the middle class," he added, then throwing in the zinger booed by the numerous Clinton partisans imported by the numerous local Clintonites: "You know, this is the kind of thing that I would expect from Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani, where we start playing with numbers."

Scripted? No doubt. But would the line have been more memorable if the format allowed those two to continue debating that issue? Very likely. In that case, Obama said what he needed to say, but the moment was lost.

This was the What Might Have Been debate for Obama. And unless he is able to adjust to often constrictive debate formats and make his points with crispness, in a few months this will be the What Might Have Been race for the Illinois senator.