Democrats: Two candidates, two constituencies

It’s the most exciting presidential race in a generation, said Steve Huntley in the Chicago Sun-Times, but it’s opened a wide fissure in the Democratic Party. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton aren’t engaged in a struggle over competing ideologies, since there’s little difference between the candidates’ positions. The rift, rather, is demographic. Women, senior citizens, Latinos, rural dwellers, and blue-collar union workers—so-called Dunkin’ Donuts Democrats—are lining up solidly behind Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama is wildly popular among people under 30, blacks, urbanites, and affluent white-collar professionals—the “Starbucks Democrats.’’ In crushing Clinton in this week’s Virginia primary, Obama did make strong inroads with women and blue-collar workers, said Jonathan Weisman in The Washington Post. It’s possible that as his campaign gathers momentum, “her coalition is beginning to crack.” But if that crack doesn’t widen dramatically, said Joe Klein in Time, then “neither candidate may prove strong or broad enough” to command enough delegates for the nomination. As Clinton and Obama battle on to Texas and Ohio, they are now engaged in an epic struggle for their party’s “demographic soul.”

The biggest divide in this race is gender, said Kathryn Jean Lopez in National Review Online. Exit polls show that “Hillary has a man problem,’’ and this time, it isn’t Bill. In California, men went for Obama, 51 percent to Clinton’s 39 percent. In South Carolina, more than twice as many men voted for him (55 percent) as for her (23 percent). It’s counterintuitive, said Frida Ghitis in the Chicago Tribune. “Men, the testosterone voters, care more about issues such as strength.” Yet here they are favoring the “placid, nonconfrontational” Obama over the relatively hawkish Clinton. “Could it be that they cannot countenance a woman in a position of enormous power?” Of course they can’t, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. Even women who have reservations about Hillary are shuddering as male pundits describe her laugh as “a cackle,’’ and seem “gleeful’’ every time she loses. Call it the “‘Kill the Witch’ syndrome.’’

Race is another major fault line, said Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. Obama has done well in mostly white states, such as Iowa, Alaska, and Minnesota, where race is mostly “a theoretical issue.’’ But Hillary soundly beat him in “such melting-pot states as California, Massachusetts, and New York,” where blacks, whites, and Latinos must live side by side, fighting for resources. Those struggles breed resentment, and people who live there have proved dubious of Obama’s lofty rhetoric about transcending differences and achieving national unity.

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The bigger story, though, is that Obama is winning white votes—millions of them, said Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe. He’s made his race virtually irrelevant to most white voters with his optimistic, colorblind message, which marks a historic break from the old politics of black victimhood and white guilt. By winning more than 40 percent of the white vote in eight states, and commanding white majorities in a half-dozen others, “he has demolished the canard that America will not elect a black president.”

In the end, the biggest difference between the two candidates is neither gender nor race, said E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post. It’s style. Obama is all passion and poetry, while Clinton offers the methodical, prosaic caution that comes with hard experience. He speaks to the country’s fervent desire for change, she to practical, older, middle-class people who are suspicious of “fervor and electricity.’’ Which candidate’s style is more likely to beat John McCain? Only if Democrats can agree on an answer to that question can they avoid the “chaos and recriminations’’ that are sure to follow if the party remains torn in two.