The Detroit Free Press Editorial Board

The contest for the Democratic presidential nomination may be all but over by the time Michigan voters get the chance to express their druthers in the open primary scheduled to take place a week from Tuesday.

The 15 primaries and caucuses scheduled to take place between now and March 8 give Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton the opportunity to build her already formidable delegate lead over rival Bernie Sanders into an insurmountable advantage, effectively excluding voters in Michigan, Ohio and other Great Lakes states from any significant role in the Democratic nominating process.

Such a development would further bolster the argument for overhauling an outdated primary calendar that affords disproportionate clout to states far less populous (and more homogenous) than ours. But it would also underline the growing recognition that former Sen. HILLARY CLINTON is by far the best candidate to lead her party’s ballot in November’s general election.

Not since then-Vice President George Bush won the Republican nomination in 1992 has either major party offered voters a candidate with such a breadth of experience in federal government. Besides playing an enormous policy-making role during her husband’s two terms in the White House, Clinton has served more than capably as a U.S. Senator and cabinet officer, presiding over President Barack Obama’s State Department during one of the most challenging and dangerous intervals since the Vietnam War.

If the world did not become dramatically safer during her tenure as Secretary of State, neither did it spin out of control. All in all, Clinton and Obama fared pretty well in containing, and even beginning to reverse, the damage wrought by their predecessors’ reckless foreign policy.

In the realm of domestic affairs, Clinton has been a bulwark in the battle to achieve and defend universal health care in the U.S. As first lady, she played a pivotal role in the creation of a Children’s Health Insurance Program that provides medical benefits to 8 million children. (Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch and other Republicans who supported the program have asserted that Clinton has exaggerated her own contribution, but their criticism does not withstand scrutiny.)

More recently, while Sanders rhapsodizes about the advantages of a the single-payer system that prevails in many European nations, Clinton has focused pragmatically on strengthening an Affordable Care Act that has extended medical coverage to millions of previously uninsured Americans.

We admire the passion and energy Sanders has brought to his populist crusade, and the often-cartoonish 2016 presidential campaign has benefited immensely from his tenacity in dragging the crucial issues of income inequality and campaign finance to center stage.

And if the president’s only job was to inspire ordinary Americans with a vision for the country’s future. Sanders might well be his party’s best standard-bearer. In many respects, he embodies the noblest traditions of the party of Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson, and he has encouraged a broad constituency of Americans that had become deeply cynical about politics to re-engage in the democratic process.

Sanders’ campaign has profited from some of the same middle class anger and frustration that fuels Donald Trump’s renegade campaign, but he has done so while eschewing Trump’s demagogic appeals to ethnic and religious bigotry. His idiosyncratic style invites caricature but never contempt; he is a serious man in a primary landscape littered with posturing pretenders to the populist mantle.

Hillary Clinton lacks Sanders’ common touch and spontaneity, and she is frequently dismissive of legitimate questions about her judgement, including those arising from her careless use of unsecured e-mail servers and her acceptance of profitable speaking gigs from financial backers eager to curry favor with the incumbent president’s likely successor. More disciplined than her talented but erratic husband, she can be similarly insensitive to the appearances of impropriety, making her vulnerable to the charge of arrogance.

But assuming the leadership of the free world, particularly in times as dangerous as these, requires more than charisma and noble aspirations. The president is above all the manager of a vast bureaucracy that can be marshaled to accomplish great things or mismanaged at enormous cost, both in both financial resources and squandered opportunity.

Responding aggressively to climate change, reining in ISIS and other terrorist organizations, sustaining a still-fragile economic recovery and developing new strategies to combat crime and drug addiction are but a handful of the urgent challenges awaiting President Obama’s successor. And, like Obama, the next president will have to confront each of those challenges in concert with a dysfunctional legislative branch and a sharply polarized electorate.

No candidate in either party seems particularly well-suited to bridging those divisions, and most of the remaining Republican contenders seem determined only to exploit them for personal and partisan political advantage. Clinton alone possesses the experience, maturity and pragmatic managerial instincts to navigate the rocky road to 2020.

Even Sanders himself acknowledges that his presidency would be doomed absent a political revolution that dramatically changes the complexion of Congress and state governments as well as the executive branch. We anticipate no such miraculous deliverance, and we are confident that Hillary Clinton is the Democrat’s best candidate to lead the divided country we share.