Keller: Warren, Deaton bring energy and passion in first debate

The opinions expressed below are Jon Keller’s, not those of WBZ, CBS News or Paramount Global.
BOSTON – You never know when you host a political debate.
Will both candidates show up ready to engage on the issues? Will they bring energy and passion to their presentation? Will they do so with relative civility and obey the rules, lest they enter the moderator’s dreaded cocoon of horror?
Across the board, US Senate candidates John Deaton and Elizabeth Warren answered yes in the WBZ/Boston Globe debate Tuesday night. 
This was Deaton’s biggest chance so far to introduce himself to a mass audience and engage Warren, who has been floating above the fray, only now airing her first TV ad. And he did his best to try to paint the two-term incumbent as a partisan “extremist” who has grown out of touch with the needs of Massachusetts during her 12 years in Washington.
It may not make the annals of soaring political rhetoric, but you may not have heard the last of Deaton’s remark that, “I got news for you Senator Warren: all of you suck in Congress.”
Warren was ready with a litany of legislation – much of it bipartisan – and her own line of attack that surely resonated with voters angry over Republican duplicity on issues like abortion and immigration reform. Again and again, she accused Deaton of reading out of “the Donald Trump playbook,” and mocked his efforts to distance himself from Trumpism. “Don’t trust John Deaton,” she concluded.
Who “won” this debate? Depends on how you define winning. Each candidate delivered solid punches and some of them landed. Even if you score it a split decision, that is surely a win for Deaton, a total unknown who performed well in his first prime-time debate against one of the Senate’s best debaters.
But a split decision means Warren gave as good as she got. And it’s likely nowhere near enough to change the inexorable dynamic of this race, in which a Democratic incumbent at the peak of her popularity heads toward election day with a big polling lead, a big money advantage, and the knowledge that anti-Trump Democrats and independents will likely flood the polls on election day.