Looking at everything Marianne Williamson said in the debate on Thursday night, it seems less like mesmerizing lunacy than a non-threatening version of what we see routinely from major candidates in Republican debates. Instead of narrow-minded and spiteful banalities, she offered nearly contentless appeals to our better angels. I’d actually be interested in hearing her expand on her ideas, but only in the same sense that I enjoy listening to wise old hippies share their thoughts on how things should be. I’m glad that there are a lot of people like this in the world and it’s a shame that the world is harsher and dirtier than anything that exists in their dreams. Williamson seems like a nice lady but she doesn’t belong on a stage with serious presidential contenders.Yet, she’s hardly alone in that distinction and I hope people can get something positive out her presence while it lasts.

I also enjoyed listening to Andrew Yang speak. He actually has novel ideas that should be welcomed as kind of disturbances in the Force.  If it weren’t for a strong performance from Kamala Harris, Yang might have actually won Thursday debate. He was the only also-ran on the stage who helped himself. From the group of one-percenters (in the polls), I think only Yang and Washington governor Jay Inslee (on Wednesday) really did much to improve their position going forward. I might have put Bill de Blasio in that category too, but then I found out he inadvertently quoted Che Guevara (“Hasta la victoria, siempre”) at a Thursday campaign stop in Miami and realized that he’s probably the dumbest man alive.

“This is the problem that we run into all the time,” Annette Taddeo, a Colombian-American state senator who spoke at the rally before de Blasio, said of the nuances of campaigning in South Florida. “The left has [some] people that are just clueless as hell.”

I don’t think it’s possible to be more clueless, that’s for sure.

It was pretty clear that Beto O’Rourke flopped in the Wednesday debate, but no one really stood out as a complete failure on Thursday. Buttigieg has some truly rough moments, but he compensated for them with some good moments. The Coloradans, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper did little more than occupy space and defend capitalism against socialism, which is perhaps needed to some small extent but is still less exciting than watching reruns of Hardball with Chris Matthews. Perhaps the most irritating performance was delivered by backbench congressman Eric Swalwell who tried to sell himself as the leader of his generation.  Kirsten Gillibrand tried to land some punches and had some degree of success, but nothing she did will be remembered when people wake up in the morning.

Overall, the Thursday night debate was dominated by Harris, Sanders and Biden. That’s bad news for Buttigieg, but it was also bad news for Biden because he took a true beating from Harris over his record of opposing busing in the 1970s. The exchange will dominate all the post-debate news coverage, and for that reason alone it was a bad night for the former vice-president.

Harris showed that she’s serious about winning the nomination by her willingness to challenge Biden so forcefully. It was something she needed to do because she can’t allow him to maintain his current support in the black community and have any hope of winning primaries.  She definitely knocked Biden down a peg and guaranteed that his campaign will be on the defensive going into the July 4 holiday, so she can consider the debate a success. Sanders and Warren may benefit more than she does, at least initially, but we’ll have to wait for a new round of polling next week before we’ll know if these debates changed the dynamics of the race.

What I expect to see is a slight tightening of the race, with Biden and Buttigieg’s numbers down and Warren and Harris’s numbers up. As I said above, perhaps we’ll see Inslee and Yang move up a tick above the rest of the bottom-dwellers, while O’Rourke may settle at the bottom with the other no-hopers.

What I’d consider a modest surprise is if Sanders drops to third or fourth place. I’d consider it a major surprise if Biden slipped into second place, but not quite as shocking if he finds himself in a tie for first.  I’m just not sure who he’d be tied with in that circumstance.

It won’t be Marianne Williamson. That much I know.