Was last night's Democratic debate in Las Vegas the complete washout it appeared to be, or were pre-debate expectations that Hillary Clinton would come unhinged and devour Barack Obama as a sobbing John Edwards begged for some sort of sanity merely another case of the media unfairly raising our expectations? Either way, while Michigan Republicans were working hard to prove that it's still possible for a well-funded white man to indeed become president in American politics, the three Democratic front-runners were left to shift their rancor toward one another from apoplectic to a more palatable terse. In other words, it was ineffably boring.

Stodgy debates such as these are usually a great place for incoherent hecklers to ply their craft, and last night was no exception. But while Nevada has long been among the nationwide leaders in the production of unbalanced lunatics, anybody hoping for Fan Man to show up last night was as disappointed as political junkies looking for red meat: Even the hecklers were mild.

Case in point: While the candidates all seemed eager to downplay the racial rift that soured the contest over the weekend (Hillary Clinton apologized for the comments made by top backer and BET founder Robert Johnson about Obama's past drug use), the charade was apparently not color-blind enough for one well-adjusted man in the crowd. Upset that moderators Tim Russert and Brian Williams spent the first half-hour of the debate expanding upon Obama's and Clinton's "Nooo, I say Lyndon Johnson hated racism more than Martin Luther King, Jr." talking points, the unseen troublemaker began screaming, "These are race-based questions!" (The timing of the outburst was a bit of a miscalculation, seeing as how Edwards had just finished answering a question tied to economic institutions).

The scofflaw was subdued after a brief and, tragically, unseen skirmish, and his confusing message of outrage seemed to have little affect on the crowd, to the point where not even Barack Obama dignified the mystery loon with one of his patented sorta/kinda funny wiseass quips. At the very least, it's proof that the Democratic Party hasn't lost all of its regrettable nutjobs to the Ron Paul juggernaut.