The close and impassioned battle for the Democratic nomination is about many things — an insider versus an outsider, the boomer generation versus the millennial generation, a choice between two different “firsts” — but oddly enough, there is one thing that it is NOT about: policy.
I say “oddly” because Democrats love to fight about policy. Indeed, observers have bemoaned that Democrats are obsessed with policy wonkery: perhaps we bore voters to tears with our 10-point plans to our electoral disadvantage. As a policy wonk myself, I’ve never really bought this critique. But the basic point — that Democratic politics are usually very issue-oriented — seems right to me.
Except in this primary season. Yes, there has been some effort by Hillary Clinton and her supporters to sharpen the distinction with Barack Obama over the differences in the two candidates’ health care plans. And certainly many supporters of Senator Obama have pointed to his opposition to the Iraq war in 2002 as a key difference with Senator Clinton. But the first of these differences has gotten very little attention of late, and the latter is more often cited as a difference in judgment rather than a current policy difference: both candidates have similar positions about what to do in Iraq now.
Beyond a lack of specific policy differences, it’s almost impossible to draw a high-level ideological distinction between Senators Clinton and Obama: neither is running as an ideological alternative to the other, and if one looks at their respective voters, a clear left- right fault line between their supporters does not emerge...
There's nothing like a real progressive candidate, and as far as I can tell, neither of these two is anything like a real progressive candidate.
But both win out over the NeoCon stormtrooper or the Prophet of Jeebus the Barbarian.
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