After three rounds now of Democratic debates, we have a settled pattern for how these things are going to go: moderators will drape a right-wing framing around their questions, almost everyone will attack Medicare for All, and Joe Biden will misrepresent his record.

With nearly all the mini-Bidens vanquished, it was down to the final boss himself. Biden, who after two lackluster debate performances and a string of increasingly hilarious “gaffes” needed to prove he was, in his words, “not going nuts,” eked out a surprisingly nondisastrous showing, largely by taking aim at Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All legislation.

While Biden’s team had leaked to the press he would be going after Elizabeth Warren during the debate, most of Biden’s big moments involved attacking Sanders; even his opening salvo against Warren on health care was that “she’s for Bernie” while Biden was “for Barack.” Biden cycled through all the familiar attacks: It costs $30 trillion over ten years! The middle class will pay more in taxes! “This is America”! South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg joined in, charging that Sanders’s bill “doesn’t trust the American people,” as did Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who said that “while Bernie wrote the bill, I read the bill,” and fearmongered about Americans losing their private insurance. (For some reason, the moderators threw it back to Warren for a response on that one.)