How nice. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama met for their final debate before Super Tuesday and opened with sweet ovations to each other, their party, and the change that will come to politics when either of them is elected president. They kept it up for 90 minutes. When it appeared they might clash, they both backed away. They couldn't have been sweeter. Admit it. You switched over to Lost.

That's a shame, because it was a substantive debate, perhaps the most substantive so far. If you're too impatient to read the rest of this piece and want to know the winner, I can't help you. For the first half of the debate, Clinton was at her best talking about the details of health care and immigration. Clinton is her message—thorough, competent, and commanding. She even had a big one-liner the crowd loved. "It took one Clinton to clean up after a Bush," she said when asked about the potential Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton trade-off of the White House, "and it may take a Clinton to clean up after a second Bush."

Obama's message is inspiration, but he wasn't terribly inspirational for most of the early part of the debate. If a voter was looking to feel the Obama magic she'd been hearing about, she didn't get it.

-John Dickerson, "Kind Words, but No Winner," Slate