Special: Bill Clinton: Asset or liability? And Nikki Haley: GOP rising star.

ANNOUNCER: This is the Washington Week Webcast Extra .

MR. WILLIAMS: Hello there. I’m Pete Williams, in for Gwen Ifill this week. And joining me around the table are these stellar reporters: Lisa Lerer of the Associated Press, Peter Baker of The New York Times , Manu Raju of CNN, and Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post .

There were seven Republican candidates on the main debate stage Thursday night, but there was also a so-called undercard debate featuring three candidates: Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum. Rand Paul boycotted the event, saying he should have been at the adults table. So, Karen, what is the status of those undercard candidates, and how do they try to break through?

MS. TUMULTY: Well, I think at this point it’s getting almost impossible to do that. And in fact, the previous star of the undercard debate, Lindsey Graham, was – the South Carolina senator – was sitting in the audience, and the next morning endorsed Jeb Bush. So, you know, I think this is – all of these people can – men and women can go on in part because they have these outside – these super PACs that can keep them going. But these are – these are the people who are pretty much run out of gas.

MR. WILLIAMS: But do they hope that something horrible happens to the front-runners and they’ll be ready to go?

MS. TUMULTY: Well, and I think, you know, Carly Fiorina managed to go from the undercard table to the grownups table, and now she’s back at the undercard. So there is a little bit of movement there.

MR. WILLIAMS: OK. Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side is sending surrogates far and wide to help her run, including her husband, Bill, and her daughter, Chelsea. Some of the Republican candidates, notably Donald Trump, have taken shots at the former president. But listen to what Bernie Sanders had to say last week.

SEN. SANDERS: (From video.) Look, Hillary Clinton is not Bill Clinton. What Bill Clinton did I think we can all acknowledge was totally, totally, totally disgraceful and unacceptable. But I am running against Hillary Clinton; I’m not running against Bill Clinton, though I gather he’s been in Iowa recently.

MR. WILLIAMS: So I’m not going to bring that up, even though I just did. (Laughter.) So is Bill Clinton a liability or an asset?

MS. LERER: It’s a fascinating dynamic on the campaign trail, and not only because you have this pretty unprecedented situation, other than with Hillary Clinton eight years ago, where you have a candidate with a former president as a spouse. But he remains incredibly popular. He gets huge crowds wherever he goes, people, and everyone wants a selfie. At the same time, there’s the baggage of the impeachment and the various scandals, and a lot of the achievements of his time in office are now being seen in a totally different lens in today’s Democratic Party. So things like the crime bill or Glass-Steagall now are sort of the underpinnings of Bernie Sanders’ campaign and the critique against his wife. So it’s really interesting to watch that play out. I was at several of his rallies this past week in New Hampshire, and I talked to a number of voters who said, oh yes, I love Bill Clinton, it was so wonderful to see him, but my heart’s with Bernie Sanders.

MR. WILLIAMS: (Laughs.) But he still has that buzz. He still has the excitement factor.

MS. LERER: He does. He’s not – you know, he’s doing this very cautiously. He’s not doing interviews. He’s not chatting up with the press. At one point someone got a question in and they asked him about Bernie Sanders, and he said I’m not going there. His events are extremely staged. He gets up, he gives remarks, that’s about it. Once in a while he’ll go to a restaurant and greet people. But this is a very cautious approach because they don’t want to have the same thing happened as happened in 2008, where he got a little heated and said some things that ended up having to be cleaned up, and also because they don’t want him to overshadow his wife.

MR. WILLIAMS: OK, thank you.

We talked about the State of the Union message. This is the Webcast Extra , so let’s talk about the Obama extra, which is after he made the speech he hit the road. Where did he go and what was he doing?

MR. BAKER: Well, he went to, of all places, Nebraska and Louisiana, two states that were not exactly pro-Obama territory. And it’s interesting because he said – you know, he had done this town hall on CNN the other week about gun control and he got challenged by people who didn’t agree with him, and his people said, well, that’s what we want to have happen more in his last year in office. He wants to talk to people who disagree with him. We’re going to these red states. But he found a lot of blue voters in these states. In the two days that we were on the road, he didn’t hear a single disagreeable word from a single voter. They were rapturous. These are people who want to see him, who love him. The questions were like, how can we be more like you, thank you so much for all this stuff.

MR. RAJU: Why are you so great? (Laughter.)

MR. BAKER: Why are you so great? (Laughter.) You know, it’s a very complex question, of course. (Laughter.) And he, of course – you know, what president doesn’t like to be told you’re wonderful, especially a president who’s, you know, not viewed as wonderful by so much of the population and hears it a lot from television? It’s interesting. So he’s not getting disagreement.

He did a Twitter chat and he took questions like, you know, which is your favorite basketball player and what’s your favorite memory. And he did – today – on Friday he did three YouTube interviews where the questions included, like, which Star Wars character would you be? No surprise, he says Han Solo. Who isn’t going to say Han Solo? But it’s – you know, the other tough question was, why are tampons considered a luxury in terms of taxation in 40 states? And he kind of scratched his head on that one and said, well, I assume it’s because men wrote the laws. But he’s not getting challenged a lot by tough questions, and you know, we’ll see if that changes.

MR. WILLIAMS: Now, you say he went to Nebraska. But as a former vice presidential candidate would say, couldn’t he see Iowa from her house?

MR. BAKER: Yes, yes. Not very far over the river, of course. He was in Omaha, across the river. He sniffed the electoral fumes and he, in fact, did make a reference to it. He says, I don’t know if you guys hear any of the TV ads here, but it’s – and he took some pretty good shots or pretty tough shots at the Republicans, much as he had in the State of the Union, particularly Donald Trump and Ted Cruz – not by name, but certainly by implication. And you know, you got the sense that he wouldn’t mind being out there on the campaign trail again. It’s an argument he wants to have.

MR. WILLIAMS: We talked during the broadcast, Manu, about Nikki Haley’s speech following the State of the Union message, the Republican response. Was it in some ways her audition? And, if so, for what?

MR. RAJU: You know, she was chosen by Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, and the House speaker, Paul Ryan, largely because they wanted to present sort of a different face for the party, someone different than what we’re hearing on the campaign trail every day. Clearly her story is very compelling for anyone at the top of a ticket. She’s a son of Indian – daughter of Indian immigrants, a woman of course, and if they’re up against Hillary that would help with potentially winning women voters. She is liked by a lot of conservatives, but she’s not universally liked by conservatives. In fact, in South Carolina she’s had a lot of battles with the state legislature. A lot of South Carolina conservatives don’t necessarily like her as much as the party establishment does. In fact, I was speaking to Mick Mulvaney, who’s a congressman from South Carolina, one of the members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, and I said, look, do you think that she has been a good governor? And he said, I’ll let the people of South Carolina decide. So she is still toxic in some conservative circles, and you saw that from her State of the Union response when she made a veiled reference to Donald Trump and she said – she said, you know, we don’t need to follow the loudest voices in the room, let’s – you know, everyone should be welcome. And after that, you know, she got attacked on the right, particularly from conservative talk radio. So clearly choosing her would please a lot of folks, but it would also be controversial.

MR. WILLIAMS: Very quickly, afterwards people were saying to her, would you be – would you consider yourself a potential vice presidential candidate, and I thought the standard answer was always supposed to be, oh, shucks, I’m just concentrating on my job. And she said yeah, I guess I would. Isn’t that right? (Laughter.)

MR. RAJU: I mean, she was honest, right. And I think that she would be, of course, on anyone’s shortlist. And Donald Trump actually was asked about her and actually handled it, didn’t criticize her at the debate, actually said some nice things about her. So who knows, it could be Trump-Haley.

MR. BAKER: But then said he bore the mantle of anger proudly.

MR. RAJU: Exactly, he was –

MR. WILLIAMS: He was ready for that, too.

MR. RAJU: Right, yeah.

MR. WILLIAMS: All right, thank you all very much. That will have to wrap it up for now. But be sure to visit our Washington Week website. Now, why? Because President Obama might have called the State of the Union “strong,” but when the Washington Week web team asked people on the National Mall the word they would use, they heard a very different story. The answers included “complex” and “divided.” So take a look at more responses or add your own on the Washington Week ’s 16 for ’16 page at PBS.org/WashingtonWeek.

I’m Pete Williams. Gwen will be back next week for another edition of the Washington Week Webcast Extra .