Let’s not dwell on my blog after the Iowa caucuses last week. The one where I said it was all over already and that the nominees would be Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio.
In my own defense, how could I have predicted that Rubio’s circuits would get crossed and he’d get stuck on the same sentence four times until he slapped himself on the back and jumped to the next sentence? Or how could I predict that Gloria Steinem would rally to the feminist cause by suggesting that Bernie Sanders’ young women supporters were just trying to get dates at the campaign office? A guy cannot make this stuff up.
So, today I’m suspending my campaign of political predictions.
I can say this: the Democrats now have a real — and a really interesting — choice. Hillary Clinton is still counting on what has long been the conventional Democratic formula for success in presidential elections: identity politics. You heard it in Clinton’s speech on Tuesday night. She ticked off policies for the usual suspects in the Democratic coalition: women, blacks, Hispanics, gays.
The problem for Clinton is that that formula in her hands is less than the sum of its parts. She just can’t come up with the over-arching inspiring theme that unites those groups and then some. Barack Obama could do that, and her husband could do that. They could talk about change and hope and bringing the country together in a way that won over not just each identity group, but also a broader swath of voters.
Clinton just feels like she’s mechanically touching each base without providing a compelling narrative that feels open to everyone. If the cliché is that winning candidates campaign in poetry and govern in prose, Clinton seems incapable of making a rhyme. She campaigns in the language of an appliance instruction manual.
Sanders, by contrast, doesn’t start with identity politics. He begins with fundamental fairness arguments that apply to everyone. He talks about income inequality and the sins of Wall Street elites who wrecked the economy and got bonuses. He’ll touch the same identity bases as Clinton, but that approach is not at the center of his campaign.
Look to Clinton to highlight that relative subtlety in the next few weeks as the campaign moves to South Carolina and Nevada, where there are a lot more African American and Hispanic voters.
Sanders’ new Democratic politics might be more successful than the old politics of identity because the big problem for the Democrats is that they lose so badly with white men, who understandably feel excluded by the conventional rhetoric. So, it’s not surprising that Sanders does better not just with young Democratic women but also Democratic men of most ages.
No predictions from me about what comes next, but I do know that Democrats have a real choice now, not just between two candidates, but between two ways of approaching politics.