In 1994, when advocating for comprehensive health care reform as first lady, Clinton told reporters that if Congress didn't pass a reform bill that year, the nation would eventually embrace a single-payer plan.

"If, for whatever reason, the Congress doesn't pass health care reform, I believe, and I may be to totally off base on this, but I believe that by the year 2000 we will have a single payer system," she said. " I don't even think it's a close call politically. I think the momentum for a single payer system will sweep the country... It will be such a huge popular issue... that even if it's not successful the first time, it will eventually be."

"I want you to understand why I am fighting so hard for the Affordable Care Act," she said at Grand View University after hearing from a woman who spoke about her daughter receiving cancer treatment thanks to the health care law. "I don't want it repealed, I don't want us to be thrown back into a terrible, terrible national debate. I don't want us to end up in gridlock. People can't wait!"

She added, "People who have health emergencies can't wait for us to have a theoretical debate about some better idea that will never, ever come to pass."

One of the most revealing exchanges in the Clinton-Sanders tilt involved the question of Wall Street corruption. Sanders has always been a passionate crusader against Wall Street perfidy, but Hillary's take on the subject was fascinating.
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Backing up: When Bill Clinton took office, it was still illegal in the United States for commercial banks to merge with investment banks and insurance companies. But toward the end of Clinton's second term, he signed a bill called the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that essentially created Too Big to Fail "supermarket" banks like Citigroup.

This isn't the only reason the financial system is so dangerous now. There's also the matter of the extreme interconnectedness of the financial services industry. This problem came violently into play in 2008, when the failure of a single idiot investment bank, Lehman Brothers, caused a chain reaction that nearly blew up the whole financial system.

This latter problem was partially a consequence of another Clinton-era law, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which deregulated derivatives like swaps that were the agent of many of those chain-reaction losses.

So Cooper's question to Hillary Clinton was really about a financial system that became dangerously over-concentrated thanks to multiple laws passed during her husband's administration. Her answer:

"Well, my plan is more comprehensive. And, frankly, it's tougher because of course we have to deal with the problem that the banks are still too big to fail. We can never let the American taxpayer and middle-class families ever have to bail out the kind of speculative behavior that we saw. But we also have to worry about some of the other players: AIG, a big insurance company; Lehman Brothers, an investment bank. There's this whole area called 'shadow banking.' That's where the experts tell me the next potential problem could come from."

A few observations:

First, it's definitive now that Hillary has no intention of reinstating Glass-Steagall. Cooper gave her a prime opportunity Tuesday night to announce otherwise, stories have filtered out of her campaign that she has no plans along those lines, and she's explicitly stated that she wants to find a "different way" to reduce risk.

The second and probably more important observation is about Hillary's rhetorical choices.

Hillary, like her close advisor Barney Frank, has been pushing an idea that banks aren't at the root of any financial instability problem. Last night, she pointed a finger instead at "shadow banking," non-bank actors like AIG, and a dead investment bank in Lehman Brothers. (Interesting she didn't mention a still-viable investment bank like Goldman, Sachs, which has hosted her expensive speaking engagements.)

This squeamishness about criticizing banks is laughable to people in the industry. But of course, that's probably the point – that the average voter won't know how absurd and desperate it is to point to faceless "shadow" financiers as villains when the real bad guys are famed mega-firms that are right out in the open, with their names plastered all over every second city block.

Companies like AIG and Lehman Brothers did, of course, shoulder blame for what took place in 2008. But there is no way to untangle what those non-bank actors did without also talking about the banks. This stuff is all connected, and it's not really that hard.
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The root of the 2008 crisis lay in a broad criminal fraud scheme, in which huge masses of home loans were given to people who couldn't afford them. Those loans in turn were bought back up by giant banks and resold to investors who weren't told how crappy the merchandise was.

AIG blew up because it insured this fraudulent market. Lehman blew up because it overinvested in it. But it was banks that financed the problem and that were possibly the most depraved actors in the narrative (apart, perhaps, from the Countrywide-style mortgage lenders who were handing loans out to anyone with a pulse).

We know this, among other things, because it was big banks like JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup that paid the biggest chunks of the $100 billion in fines Hillary later referenced in the debate. There is a vast record of documentary and witness evidence now attesting to the mass fraud, which was of a type that can and probably will happen again. The policy issue is how to curb the impact of that inevitable next crooked scheme.