A strange role reversal is under way amid the falling snows of New Hampshire. For decades it has been the Republican party that has waged an ideological battle with itself, testing candidates on their fidelity to principle, scorning those deemed to have strayed too far from the faith. Every four years, the party has confronted its would-be presidents with a searching question: are you conservative enough to lead us?
Now, though, perhaps for the first time in half a century, the Democrats are engaged in a similar search for ideological purity. In a contest tighter and sharper than almost anyone predicted, the battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders — whose next front is this small, frozen state on the east coast, which votes on Tuesday — has acquired an unfamiliar doctrinal edge.
Much of the first head-to-head debate between the pair last Thursday night was devoted to a competition over who was the true progressive. In exchanges that grew increasingly testy, Clinton suggested Sanders had set himself up as “the self-proclaimed gatekeeper for progressivism”, imposing a definition that would have excluded a roll call of popular Democrats, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy.
Sanders shot back that Clinton had recently called herself a “moderate” and that if you’re a moderate, you can’t also be a progressive. He insisted that Clinton was too close to Wall Street — she had taken fat speaker fees for lectures to Goldman Sachs — to merit the progressive badge of honour.
This is more than a spat about semantics. At its heart is a dispute that perennially afflicts parties of the left around the world, one that still consumes the Labour party in the UK. “I’m a progressive who gets things done,” Clinton said, making the case that was repeatedly pressed on Jeremy Corbyn as he sought the Labour leadership last summer: you’re not a true progressive if you can’t make progress, if your principles are doomed to remain unimplemented.
So she doesn’t say Sanders is wrong, exactly, to want a health care system operated on the same universal principle as Britain’s National Health Service. She just says that it will be impossible to get such a plan through a hostile Congress, that it makes more sense to build on what Obama has already done than to start all over again. If she had to make an honest bumper sticker it would say, “Don’t let the best be the enemy of the good.”
Unstated is her even deeper conviction: that the American people are never going to elect an avowed socialist and that if Sanders is the nominee, you might as well hand the Republicans the keys to the White House right now.
This is the argument now raging in the Democratic party. The pragmatic, unexciting path — which involves dodging round obstacles, and patching together unsightly compromises — set against the exhilarating clarity and moral force of undiluted principle.
Obama’s historic breakthrough
Democrats don’t usually have contests like this. In 2008, when the choice was between Obama and Clinton, Obama’s appeal was the historic breakthrough he represented rather than doctrinal difference. In earlier battles, the central preoccupation was usually electability. You have to go back to Eugene McCarthy’s anti-war challenge to Lyndon Johnson in 1968 to recall such an ideological civil war inside the Democratic party.
For now, the polls say Sanders is on course to surpass McCarthy’s achievement all those years ago in New Hampshire and to win a handsome victory over Clinton. But the Clinton camp has managed expectations cleverly. Now Sanders’ victory is expected, already built into the price. Indeed, it’s partially discounted: New Hampshire is the backyard of his home state of Vermont, full of the kind of young, white liberal Democrats who are Sanders’ base. Let’s see, say the Clintonites, how he fares once the battle shifts to the more diverse, more urban parts of Democratic America.
Meanwhile, there are signs the Republicans are making a shift of their own. The political analyst Henry Olsen says that every Republican nomination battle since 1964 has turned on the question of whether their party should be “the vehicle for the conservative movement”. If the answer to that question in 2016 is yes, then New Hampshire would surely follow the lead set by Iowa and choose the ultra-conservative senator Ted Cruz.
Less ideological question
But New Hampshire always likes to do its own thing and for many Republicans a different, less ideological question seems to be emerging. At a town hall meeting for Marco Rubio at a school in the small town of Salem on Thursday, Debbie Vance, a 52-year-old office manager, was weighing up the merits of the Florida senator over Cruz. She’s making sure to see all the candidates she can ahead of Tuesday, submitting them to what she calls the “eye test”, eyeballing them for herself before making a decision.
She liked Cruz’s message, but was shifting towards Rubio. “Not that I like him more, but it’s ‘who can beat them?’” She reckoned Rubio — mid-40s, charismatic, a fine speaker — could easily defeat Clinton.
And that’s the pitch he makes for himself too. “She does not want to run against me,” Rubio says of Clinton, “but I can’t wait to run against her.”
He spends less time trying to out-conservative Ted Cruz or Donald Trump — who the polls say will win New Hampshire handsomely — than in declaring he is simply more electable than they are. “I can win,” Rubio says, again and again.
With a glamorous wife, adorable children and a fable of the American Dream as a backstory — “My dad was a bartender on Miami beach and my mom was a maid” — you can see his point. Almost apologetically, one supporter in the Salem crowd declares him “the Republican Obama”.
More acceptable face
Not that Rubio is some kind of soft-hearted moderate. His promise to overturn Obamacare, like his dismissal of a question on climate change — “It’s going to snow tomorrow!” — confirm that he is still a man of the right. Just one with a much more acceptable face.
All of this is predicated on the notion that Trump may be amusing, even thrilling to watch — that he may channel the deepest longings of the conservative id — but that he can’t be president. As Vance put it: “He says a lot of things that we think — but some things shouldn’t be said out loud.” Rubio does not mention Trump. But you know who he has in mind when he says: “Anger is not a plan.”
It could be that that view is gaining ground among Republicans: that it’s not enough to find a candidate who channels your fury, you need one who can win and do something about it. But among the Democrats, that argument is still raging, white hot even in the New Hampshire snow.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Jonathan Freedland is the Guardian’s executive editor, Opinion.
