Democrats: Torn between two futures

last updated 8 January 2015

With barely 50 days to go before the Iowa caucuses, said Ronald Brownstein in the Los Angeles Times, Democrats face an intriguing choice. Their two front-runners, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, offer very different visions for a party that’s smarting after years of Republican domination. Hillary, who knows how “to respond to a punch with a punch,” is selling herself as the old political pro, toughened and made wise by years of attacks from the right. In her candidacy, which drives conservatives mad, Democrats see the promise of sweet revenge. Obama, though, is preaching a gospel of reconciliation and compromise on behalf of “the greater good.” Rather than pander to interest groups, he’s told a crowd of automakers that they have to raise mileage standards, and a black audience that unwed fathers are their biggest problem. The nation will remain bitterly fractured between red and blue, Obama argues, unless our new president reaches out “beyond the party’s base” to build new coalitions.

The closer you look, said Peter Canellos in The Boston Globe, the clearer the dilemma becomes. With their hearts, Democrats are yearning for Obama’s charisma, youth, and promise of a fresh break from the bitterness of the Clinton and Bush years. “No candidate in recent memory has embodied the deepest hopes of so many.” Yet they fear he’s naïve and inexperienced—too nice a guy to survive the barroom brawl of a general election. That’s why their heads are favoring Hillary. True, her campaign “is mildewed with the air of past scandals.” But her “ability to fight is undiminished,” which argues that she has a better chance of winning. The indecision is so great that the latest polls now show her and Obama in a statistical tie in Iowa, which will hold its first-in-the-nation caucuses on Jan. 5. The battle for the nomination “is no ordinary beauty contest.” It’s “an intense, ongoing struggle within the consciences of Democratic voters.”

In making up their minds, Democrats can safely ignore the candidates’ position papers, said E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post. On most of the issues, relatively little separates Clinton from Obama. Both support some form of universal health coverage. Both would almost certainly raise Social Security taxes on the wealthiest taxpayers. Quite deliberately, Clinton comes across as more of a hawk than Obama, but their positions on Iraq are now very similar—get out as soon as we safely can. So the choice comes down to a single question: Is the Democrats’ best hope Obama’s idealism, or Clinton’s realism?