The crippling jabs that helped Hillary Clinton win the first debate

As I watched the first presidential debate on Monday night, any and all sense of irony lifted, and reality set in. Watching Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump stride out on to the stage, with the polls nearly tied, I suddenly felt a palpable weight in the pit of my stomach. My God, I thought. Donald Trump could be president.

But it didn't take long for Clinton to pull ahead, and eventually secure a clear victory. To invoke the tired boxing analogy, it was not a knockout, but it was a clear victory on points.

Clinton was, as usual, extremely well-briefed. She appeared knowledgeable, sensible, and quite helplessly uncool. She lacks the rhetorical agility and cutting wit to land a really hard blow (and some of her prepped jibes were hilariously lame), but what she lacks in owns, she made up for in reassuring calmness.

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Trump, by contrast, was his usual manic self (after a brief slow warm-up). He tended to get more time on the clock through his constant interruptions and rambling answers, but seemed unstable and unsure of himself. He often appeared to be trying to fudge his way through some uncomfortable topic. And for some reason, he was constantly sniffling.

He landed a few blows, but he was too compromised and incoherent to make them stick. He had some good lines about Clinton's over-aggressive foreign policy, but then argued it should be even more aggressive. He rightly hit Clinton for using the racist term "superpredator," but then argued the racist profiling of stop-and-frisk should be brought back.

While Clinton didn't deliver any knockout punches, she succeeded in pushing Trump to tacitly admit several quite shocking things in front of tens of million of people. First, she attacked him for not releasing his tax returns, suggesting that it was because he pays no federal income tax. And he did not dispute it. Instead he argued that previous years when he had paid no tax showed he was "smart," and said the money "would be squandered anyway." When Clinton attacked him for using the bankruptcy process to stiff his creditors, including many working-class laborers, Trump retorted, "I take advantage of the laws of the nation because I'm running a company. My obligation right now is to do well for myself, my family, my employees, for my companies."

In other words, Trump all but admitted to being a rich man who pays as little tax as possible (as David Fahrenthold reports, perhaps to an illegal degree) and uses the bankruptcy process to shaft working-class people.

But perhaps most effectively, Clinton launched a clearly prepared attack about Trump's hideous mistreatment of Alicia Machado, the 1996 Miss Universe (and first winner after Trump bought the contest). Trump had called her "Miss Piggy," and "Miss Housekeeping," Clinton said. Then, right after the debate, Clinton's social media team posted an absolutely brutal ad where Machado personally claimed Trump had stiffed her of contractually-promised ad revenue, and showing Trump viciously mocking her weight gain and forcing her to work out in front of reporters:

This was a brilliant use of research the Clinton campaign has clearly been saving for just such an occasion. Chances are good there are more hard hits where that came from.