I was mildly disappointed in Bernie. He did poorly in the first half, and there were a few times where he could have called out some of Clinton's weaker responses (particularly with regards to telling Wall St. to "cut it out") without personally attacking her, and he got absolutely stomped on gun control. With that said, I was never under the delusion that he would crush her or even match her in the debate. He did quite well in the second part, though. If he wants to get anywhere, I think he'll have to tone down the anger a bit and hit Clinton on important issues more aggressively when the opportunities present themselves. At this point I want to say that she's the least of his problems, though - he really has to work on his delivery and he has to do a better job of explaining socialism. He missed several opportunities to liken it to the New Deal, which could have gone a long way in getting his message across.
Hillary was debating as though she were already the nominee - she didn't have a whole lot of answers at times and gave a bunch of non-answers, which was frustrating. At the same time, it makes sense for her to do that since it leaves her with less ammunition for the Republicans to use against her. Her answers related to college tuition and her non-answer regarding black lives matter were also frustrating (although the BLM thing is Cooper's fault). Also frustrating was how she didn't say anything of substance about how she would have been different from Obama, but I would have thought that an answer like, "I wouldn't be majorly different" would have been acceptable. I guess her answer was close enough to saying that.
O'Malley was probably the biggest surprise. He didn't do particularly well, but he didn't do terribly, either. I get the feeling he'll have gained the most from the debate. Webb was terrible, constantly complaining about equal time. Chafee's "I was new" answer was truly embarrassing (it looked like he died a little on the inside). I think Hillary had the best closing statement since she didn't mention her website or anything too specific. Bernie's was nothing new; O'Malley's was great up until the really specific 2050 mention that kind of ruined the flow of it.
All in all, I liked the debate. It wasn't a game-changer, but it wasn't boring, either. The candidates treated each other like people, and there seemed to be quite a lot of consensus to go around. I'm also okay with the idea of voting for Hillary now if Bernie doesn't make the nomination (I would've voted for her anyway, but now I'm at least comfortable with the prospect of doing so). This debate really cemented the idea that none of the Republicans have a contender who would have chance in hell at beating Hillary. At this point I'm almost hoping for a Trump nomination so that I could watch her run circles around him for a few hours.
I liked Cooper for the most part. He threw more softball questions at Hillary than anyone else, but he still had some good questions for her. He also seemed to interrupt everyone quite a bit, and that got tiring pretty quickly. Still, he showed why he's the best person on CNN. Don Lemon was surprisingly tolerable. I thought he was going to say some stupid shit, but he didn't this time around.
I'll support Bernie to the end, but if and when Hillary wins the primary, I'd vote for her in a heartbeat. She's so much better than any of the nutjobs in the Republican party.
I still don't get the Bernie supporters who say they'd sooner vote for Trump than for Hillary. What's the deal with that? There are few candidates more corporate than Trump. He's like the anti-Bernie, much more so than Hillary has ever been.