When the issue of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private e-mail server came up last month in the first Democratic presidential debate, I — and you, too, I suspect — leaned in closer to the TV. 

This was the issue that had single-handedly transformed Clinton from untouchable to under fire in her bid for the Democratic nomination. It was her weak spot, one that you might want to go after if you were, say, Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s main rival for the nomination.

Wrong, sort of. After Clinton gave her standard-issue answer — I’ve said I made a mistake, no laws were broken, etc. — Sanders chimed in with this: “I think the secretary is right. And that is, I think the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn e-mails.”

It was clear that Sanders had that line ready going into the debate. That he interjected after Clinton finished her answer suggested that he was executing a play put together by his campaign in debate prep.

But it didn’t go to plan. When the Clinton-Sanders back-and-forth happened, I wondered aloud (I talk to myself a lot) whether he had been misunderstood, whether accidentally or, more likely, on purpose, by Clinton. What I took Sanders to mean was that Clinton’s e-mail issue was a major distraction in the race and that she was to blame for it.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks Saturday at the University of South Carolina at Aiken. (Chris Thelen/Augusta Chronicle via AP) 

The way it played out, with Clinton thanking Sanders and reaching over to shake his hand in a gesture of goodwill, made it look as though the senator from Vermont was saying that the e-mail issue didn’t matter at all and that no one should be talking about it. The crowd’s going bananas with applause in response seemed to confirm the sense that Sanders was offering Clinton a helping hand on her toughest issue.

Now Sanders is trying to correct that record. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published last week, he said that the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server while she was at the State Department is worthy and should continue.

“You get 12 seconds to say these things,” Sanders told the Journal of his debate exchange on Clinton’s e-mails. “There’s an investigation going on right now. I did not say, ‘End the investigation.’ That’s silly. . . . Let the investigation proceed unimpeded.”

“I didn’t let her off the hook,” he told the Boston Globe’s editorial board late last week. “There is a process going on in this country. There is an investigation. The FBI is doing what it is doing.”

Sanders and his campaign team insist that he said nothing new about Clinton’s e-mails in the Journal interview. And, in a way, he’s right. What he told the Journal and the Globe this past week is really the message he was trying to send at the debate last month: Clinton’s e-mails are a distraction that she created. That should tell us something about her.

The simple fact is that Sanders cannot win this nomination by playing nice with Clinton. If he chooses to focus on the issues, he will remain what he is today: a favorite of a certain brand of liberal. But there aren’t enough of those people — or enough issues on which Clinton and Sanders have major disagreements — to make Sanders a real threat to win.

The only path for Sanders or anyone else is to put Clinton’s reputation and image on the ballot. The simplest way to do that is using the e-mail issue as a proxy to raise broader questions about Clinton’s judgment and motives.

I’m still not sure that Sanders will go that route, because it seems anathema to the above-politics persona he has built for himself. “I can’t walk down a hallway in the nation’s capital without people begging me to beat up on Hillary Clinton, attack Hillary Clinton,” Sanders told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow at a Democratic candidate forum in South Carolina on Friday night. “Tell me why she’s the worst person in the world.”

But what is clear is that Sanders gets that giving Clinton a free pass on her e-mails is untenable in the context of the primary race, and he is doing some cleanup work to make sure she doesn’t get one. 

The big question is whether Sanders will raise the issue when the candidates debate Saturday in Iowa. If he wants to have a real chance to win, he should.