Opinion

  Opinion  

DAVID BRODER: INDIANA, N.C. SHOULDN'T MATTER

The endless Democratic presidential campaign has lurched from irrelevance to trivia, triggering a near-universal call to bring it to a halt.

The two states that voted on Tuesday -- Indiana and North Carolina -- are so unimportant to Demo-cratic chances of electing the next president that it is unlikely that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama will make more than a token appearance there after one of them is nominated.

Unless John McCain butchers his campaign, he will be an odds-on favorite to continue the Republican winning streak in both states. Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and a host of earlier candidates failed to make them competitive.

In a sensible nominating system, these states would never become important battlegrounds. Lots of people complain that Iowa and New Hampshire enjoy disproportionate influence because of their place at the start of the process. But both are closely contested in November -- not throwaways.

Indiana and North Carolina were doubly irrelevant this year, because the "issues" that Clinton and Obama were discussing in their two weeks there were some of the phoniest of this entire election cycle.

Obama was all but obliterated for that time by the huge media-fanned controversy over his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Wright's inflammatory comments were obnoxious, but they bore no resemblance to the rhetoric and the record of the Illinois senator. I'd like to know the kind of people Obama would bring into his White House, and where he would turn for a Cabinet, because there is so much uncertainty about his actual policies at home and abroad.

But Wright will clearly not be anywhere in that administration, so why waste a full fortnight on him?

But if Obama contributed to the Wright fiasco by his hesitancy in breaking with him, Clinton was worse. She flooded North Carolina and Indiana with phoniness -- playing a drag version of Dennis Kucinich, a beer-drinking populist, not the honors graduate of Wellesley College and Yale Law School that she is.

As if that were not enough, she joined McCain in promoting the idea of a gas-tax holiday that would last just through the summer, a step that would guarantee no actual reduction in the price at the pump and could encourage more energy waste. The fact that this cockamamie idea had already been rejected not only by President Bush but by the Democratic speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, did not deter Clinton from promoting it as if it were a serious policy.

Still, for all the factors that ought to diminish the importance of Tuesday's results, the political effect was to move Obama a significant distance down the road to nomination.

David Broder is a columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group.