Unite, Not Divide, Really This Time

NYT Editorial

The New Hampshire primary has done Americans a service by leaving both parties’ nominating contests open and giving a truly broad range of voters a chance to participate in these vitally important choices. The coming contests will be colored in large part by how the contenders and their backers answer a basic question: Just how far are they willing to go to win?

If the Republican fringe plays to type and decides to savage John McCain, the party’s winner in New Hampshire, once again, and if the Clinton camp continues to allow its baser instincts to rule, they will do more harm than good to themselves, to their parties and to the political process. The danger signs are there on both sides, but are glaringly evident among the Democrats.

Senator Barack Obama did not refrain from dropping cutting comments about Senator Hillary Clinton into his speeches. “I’m not running because I think it’s my turn, that it’s somehow owed to me,” he would say. But he generally pitched his speeches on notes of inspiration and hope.

Mrs. Clinton ran an angry campaign in New Hampshire, and polls showed that voters noticed. She won narrowly, but came perilously close to injecting racial tension into what should have been — and still should be — an uplifting contest between the first major woman candidate and the first major African-American candidate.

In the days before the voting, Mrs. Clinton and her team were so intent on talking about how big a change a woman president would be — and it surely would — that some of her surrogates even suggested that it would be a more valuable change than an African-American president. Mrs. Clinton managed to energize the women’s vote in New Hampshire to win the contest, but the Democratic Party should be celebrating its full diversity, a refreshing and notable difference from the field of Republican contenders.

In Mrs. Clinton’s zeal to make the case that experience (hers) is more important than inspirational leadership (Mr. Obama’s), she made some peculiar comments about the relative importance of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson to the civil rights cause. She complimented Mr. King’s soaring rhetoric, but said: “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ... It took a president to get it done. ”

Why Mrs. Clinton would compare herself to Mr. Johnson, who escalated the war in Vietnam into a generational disaster, was baffling enough. It was hard to escape the distasteful implication that a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change. She pulled herself back from the brink by later talking about the mistreatment and danger Mr. King faced. Former President Bill Clinton, who seems to forget he is not the one running, hurled himself over the edge on Monday with a bizarre and rambling attack on Mr. Obama.

Mr. Clinton has generally been a statesman as ex-president, and keeping up this sort of behavior will undermine his credibility and ability to do more good.

We understand, and usually admire, Mrs. Clinton’s determination. Allowing her team’s wearyingly familiar strong-arm instincts to take over would be damaging for the Democrats in the fall, no matter who gets the nomination. Polls in Iowa and New Hampshire show that Democratic voters liked all of their candidates — they simply chose one. It would be a mistake for a politician whose unfavorable ratings across the nation have long been stuck in the 40 percent range to erase that good feeling about her party.

In 2000, after Mr. McCain beat George W. Bush in New Hampshire, the Republican Party’s right wing savaged the Arizona senator and his family during the South Carolina primary. It was the nation’s first taste of the politics of division practiced by Mr. Bush and Karl Rove that became the guiding principle of Mr. Bush’s presidency: winning justifies denying any role to the losers — even dissenting Republicans.

This year the Republicans have joined the Democrats in the chorus of change, and American voters have a right to expect it. The Republicans have not held back from criticizing each other, but not with the ferocity or the small-mindedness perfected by Mr. Rove. Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, ran a negative campaign, and he lost in his neighboring state.

Mr. McCain, despite some pandering, is still not the choice of social conservatives or religious conservatives. As with the Democrats, however, Republicans have done well with voters by talking about leading all Americans.

That is not to say theirs has been an uplifting campaign. The Republicans happily accuse the Democrats of advocating socialized medicine, which anyone who has listened to them knows is nonsense. Rudolph Giuliani has built his entire bid for the White House feeding fears of terrorism. But Mr. McCain, Mr. Huckabee and even Mr. Romney talk about how disillusioned Americans are with Washington and about their intent to unite the country.

Americans have had seven painful and disillusioning years. The last thing they want is for either party to drag out the old playbooks of division and anger. We doubt now whether Mr. Bush ever intended to deliver on his 2000 pledge to unite, not divide. Americans still want, and deserve, a leader who will fulfill that promise.