It was an outstanding debate tonight on MSNBC. It was held outdoors at Soldier Field (Home of Da Bears) in Chicago, and it was a good old Union get-together. Some reports said about 15,000 people were there. Seven candidates were there. Mike Gravel did not attend.

Kucinich seemed to do better than most in the forum. He had to pick up some points with the far left tonight. When asked about NAFTA, Kucinich said he would completely scrap it. He said during the first week of his administration he would tell the President of Mexico and the Prime Minister of Canada that he was scraping NAFTA and WTO. As you can imagine, the Union members loved it. The applause was probably the loudest for any answer. Most other candidates said they would “reform” it in someway.

The moderator, Keith Olbermann, had a hard time keeping the audience under control, but I felt the cheering added to the forum. When they have these debates, they should allow extra time for all the time lost when people cheer or boo.

It’s really hard to tell who the winner was, but it seems they all did well in some parts of the forum. They all received loud applause for their remarks to various questions during the forum. Some folks even received some boos from the audience for their answers. Some questions were dodged.

The winners: Kucinich, Clinton, Obama, Edwards
The losers: Dodd and Biden. Richardson fell back to the lower tier tonight.

Note on Richardson: He made a very good point about veterans’ healthcare. He wants to give everyone who is a veteran a “Hero’s Card” so they can get healthcare at any public hospital – no traveling for hundreds of miles. He also wants mandatory funding. I remember a few years ago that former Sen. Burns brought up the idea of a card to use for this. It was shot down. Maybe a President could get it done.