I’m no good at sartorial stuff, so I can’t describe how Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were actually dressed. But I can tell you what they were effectively wearing: targets.

They came into the debate in Detroit on Tuesday night not just as the highest-polling candidates among the 10 on the stage, but also as the most ardent progressives, with plans more expansive and expensive than their rivals’. That gave those rivals both the motivation and the means to attack.

So they did, portraying Sanders and Warren as fantasists peddling policies — single-payer health care, the decriminalization of illegal border crossings, the elimination of all or most college debt — that were poorly conceived pipe dreams and, worse yet, recipes for President Trump’s re-election.

You were expecting the two of them to fight each other, because they have overlapping fan bases and because both of them want the progressive mantle? Hah. They were too busy doing battle with the candidates flanking them.

Those candidates — especially John Delaney, John Hickenlooper, Amy Klobuchar, Steve Bullock and Tim Ryan — portrayed Sanders and Warren as denizens of some lofty, lefty dreamland that would be unrecognizable and unappealing to swing voters between the coasts.

Sanders and Warren, in turn, cast their critics as merchants of nothing more than “small ideas and spinelessness,” as Warren put it. She didn’t match Sanders’s volume — who can and who would want to? — but her lines were as good or better.

Like this one: “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.”

Or this: “Democrats win when we figure out what is right and we get out there and fight for it. I am not afraid. And for Democrats to win, you can’t be afraid either.” Fight, fight, fight, fight. There is no syllable more central to Warren’s campaign.

She’s sharp. She’s stirring. I also think she’s wrong — wrong that enough general-election voters will choose a candidate who aims to take away options when it comes to medical insurance, wrong that enough of them want a government at bitter war with all of corporate America, wrong that enough of them would be comfortable with the scope of federal spending that she proposes.

But she makes the case with more freshness than Sanders does. I spent much of Tuesday night wishing that he would go away — wishing, actually, that everyone but she and Delaney would go away, at least for a few hours, so I could watch a less diffuse, less digressive debate between just the two of them, an idealist versus an incrementalist, a progressive against a moderate, perfectly illustrating the clashing perspectives in the Democratic Party right now and the fault line running through the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy Marianne Williamson. How can you not? She says big things and loopy things and impassioned things and sometimes they’re even the same thing. And she’s constantly chiding Democrats for what clichéd, banal, uneducable windbags they can be. More than a few of them need to hear that.

And I was impressed by Pete Buttigieg. I’m always impressed by him. How does a person become this articulate, this informed and this poised by the age of 37? It’s like his parents read him the Encyclopaedia Britannica instead of “Goodnight, Moon” and regularly injected him with some analogue of human growth hormone that supersizes developing brains.

Also, I was amused by John Hickenlooper. I mean that genuinely and kindly. He participated in the night’s most entertaining exchange, when he mocked Sanders’s grand plans by saying that they won’t come to pass just because Sanders wishes for them or throws his arms up in the air. Sanders does wave his arms a lot, or, rather, flaps them, so much so that you wonder at times if he’s trying to make a point or take flight. Anyway, Hickenlooper imitated him. Then Sanders imitated Hickenlooper. Then Hickenlooper imitated Sanders again. And for a few seconds, they looked like participants not in a presidential debate but in a calisthenics class.

Hickenlooper began the evening with the observation that while Democrats picked up 40 seats in the House in the 2018 midterms, not one Democrat who flipped a district from red to blue did so by running on the kind of agenda that Sanders and Warren are pushing now. It’s a crucial point and a powerful argument against either Sanders or Warren as the Democratic nominee. But neither of the two of them ever directly addressed or specifically rebutted it.

There were smaller contests within the larger one on Tuesday night — for example, Buttigieg versus Beto O’Rourke, 46, for the affections of voters who yearn for generational change. Buttigieg definitely came out on top, in part because he hewed more tightly to the argument that it was time for new approaches and unsullied optimism, capably noting how much of the conversation around him had remained unchanged in Democratic politics for decades. O’Rourke rambled, and the only strong impression of him that I came away with was that he’s tall. His performance won’t arrest his fade from the promise and prominence of his 2018 Senate campaign. He must miss Ted Cruz dearly, and no one ever does that.

Buttigieg’s backers told him before this debate that he needed to show more fire than he did the last time around, after which he stalled in the polls. He didn’t achieve quite the animation that they sought, but he made strides in that direction. At no point during the night did I come so close to standing up and cheering as when he took on Trump’s Republican enablers on Capitol Hill.

“If you are watching at home and you are a Republican member of Congress,” he said, “consider the fact that when the sun sets on your career, and they are writing your story, of all the good and bad things you did in your life, the thing you will be remembered for is whether in this moment, with this president, you found the courage to stand up to him or continued to put party over country.” It was a canned soliloquy, sure, but that made it no less necessary.

Maybe Delaney gets some wind out of the night, although I suspect he’s at such a negligible velocity that it doesn’t matter. Maybe one of the other moderates does, though they became, as the evening went on, not so much individual candidates as a blockade against Democratic socialism, the dizzier dimensions of the Green New Deal and any Medicare for all plan that starts by wiping out private insurance. They raised the right questions about it and poked the right holes in it, prompting Warren to complain repeatedly that they were playing into Republicans’ hands by appropriating Republican talking points.

That was deft of her politically and cheap of her substantively, which made two things abundantly clear.

One, she’s a better candidate than Sanders, at least in the abstract.

Two, if she winds up with the nomination, it will be after planting herself as firmly as possible on an island of purity.

There’s probably no credible toggle toward the center for her, no ready bridge to a messier but potentially bigger mainland. What bold real estate. What risky terrain, too.

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Frank Bruni has been with The Times since 1995 and held a variety of jobs — including White House reporter, Rome bureau chief and chief restaurant critic — before becoming a columnist in 2011. He is the author of three best-selling books.  @FrankBruni • Facebook

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