Clinton surges ahead in contest overshadowed by GOP antics

It’s not getting as much news media attention, but there’s a presidential race going on where no one has talked about a rival’s hand size or whether they’ve wet their pants, or called each other losers or choke artists.

Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have sharp differences, but they’ve mostly expressed them with the dignity Americans have come to expect from candidates who want to lead the country and be its face to the world. Maybe voters want something or someone else these days; that’ll be clear by November.

In the meantime, results from the Super Tuesday contests in 11 states showed Clinton building a significant lead in the race for the Democratic nomination she lost to Barack Obama eight years ago. Her Southern firewall looked strong: She won Texas, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas, states with more than 65% of the delegates at stake Tuesday.

Sanders, who won Vermont and Oklahoma, isn’t going away, but he’s having trouble in states with electorates more diverse than in his native New England.

Even a modest lead should help Clinton. The Democrats’ rules for awarding delegates favor the front-runner, and that’s what Clinton still is, despite Sanders’ remarkable job of turning what once looked like a Clinton runaway into a tighter race.

If experience were the only test, Clinton would easily be the most qualified candidate in either party. After eight years in the White House as an unusually active first lady, eight years in the Senate and four years as secretary of State, she would need little on-the-job training.

But all those years in the limelight have made her a polarizing figure, and Clinton has judgment problems that can turn her into her own worst enemy. The controversies over her high-dollar speeches to Wall Street audiences (for which she refuses to release transcripts) and her ill-advised insistence on a private email server while she was secretary of State have gotten in the way of her message for months, and rightly so. An FBI investigation over classified information in some of her emails could make things even worse.

Sanders seems to lack the capacity to make supporters wince the way Clinton can. But his policy proposals, though well intentioned, are too often unmoored from political and financial reality to be credible.

Voting means hoping a politician’s capabilities will outweigh the flaws. That’s always true, and never more so than this year.