It’s About the White House

NYT Editorial

Like many Americans, we have been intrigued and often exasperated by the long-running Democratic primary and the ever smaller-bore spats between Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. So we are thankful to Senator John McCain for reminding us Tuesday what this year’s presidential race really is about.

While Democrats voted in North Carolina, which Mr. Obama won, and in Indiana, which was too close to call at press time, Mr. McCain spoke about his judicial philosophy. He is determined to move a far too conservative and far too activist Supreme Court and federal judiciary even further and more actively to the right.

Mr. McCain predictably criticized liberal judges, vowed strict adherence to the founders’ views and promised to appoint more judges in the mold of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. That is just what the country does not need.

Since President Bush chose Justices Roberts and Alito, the court has ordered Seattle and Louisville to scrap voluntary school integration, protected employers who illegally mistreat their workers and constrained women’s right to choose and citizens’ right to vote.

Mr. McCain did not mention, of course, how the Roberts-led court blithely overruled Congress by nullifying an important part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. He did wax nostalgic about what “the basic right of property” has meant “since the founding of America.” (He did not mention that in 1789, many women could not own property and African-Americans were property, but he did criticize the idea that values evolve over time.)

There was a moment when we were briefly cheered. Mr. McCain declared that “all the powers of the American presidency must serve the Constitution and thereby protect the people and their liberties.” We hoped that would be the start of a serious critique of how President Bush has violated cherished civil liberties: endorsing torture, ordering unlawful domestic spying and depriving detainees of the most basic right of habeas corpus.

Mr. McCain himself has eloquently criticized Mr. Bush’s policies on some of these issues, but he did not raise any of them on Tuesday.

Which brings us back to the Democratic primaries. It is increasingly clear that the superdelegates are going to have to settle this race. There is already a lot of discussion about how they should do so. Choose the candidate who won his or her state primary or caucus? Or the one with the most delegates? Or the most votes overall?

Mr. McCain’s speech suggests an additional metric: the candidate best able in coming weeks to explain to American voters what is truly at stake in the election and why the country cannot, for example, afford another president committed to packing the courts with activist, right-wing judges.

There are few policy differences between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama. But there is a vast gulf between Mr. McCain and the two Democrats — and far too little difference between Mr. McCain and President Bush.

Instead of sparring, pointlessly, about who first opposed Nafta or which of these Ivy League-educated lawyers has a more common touch, Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton should explain what they would do to restore the balance of power and protect civil liberties. They need to talk a lot more about addressing the health care crisis and the mortgage crisis and how they would bring American troops home and contain the chaos in Iraq.

The last Democratic primary is less than a month away. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama can spend that time tearing each other up or they can truly debate the issues — the ones that separate Democrats from Republicans. The voters, not just the superdelegates, deserve that.