Hillary Clinton distanced herself a bit from some of her fellow Democrats on immigration during last night’s debate. She said that undocumented immigrants should be allowed to buy insurance on Obamacare exchanges, but she wouldn’t back Martin O’Malley’s plan to offer them full Obamacare subsidies. O’Malley and Bernie Sanders have also endorsed in-state tuition for undocumented students, but Clinton would only say she’d support states that chose to offer it. She also said she would go even farther than President Obama to push executive actions for the undocumented.

Those are genuine disagreements. But as Clinton pointed out, they’re also relatively trivial. “There is such a difference between everything you’re hearing here on this stage, and what we hear from Republicans,” she said.

That’s certainly true on immigration, where the GOP candidates all oppose Obama’s executive actions, and all focused on border security at their two debates; the only real disputes on the Republican side were whether it was feasible to try to deport the 11 million (as the candidates called them) “illegals” currently in the country, and whether it was appropriate for politicians to address the public in Spanish. But it is also true on just about every other issue that came up in the debates so far, and many that didn’t.

On everything from Planned Parenthood to the Iran deal to family leave to climate change, the differences within the parties are relatively minor, while the differences between the parties are spectacularly major. Americans tend to think of politics as occurring on a spectrum, and the media tend to cover it that way, but the debates have been a reminder of the vast gulf that has opened between Republicans and Democrats, not only on the issues, but in their perceptions of reality in the Obama era.

It was amusing to hear Clinton declare that “nobody wants to send ground troops to Syria,” which was certainly true of the candidates on stage last night. But at the Republican debate, there was a discussion of whether you could be a serious candidate if you didn’t want to send ground troops to Syria. At the Democratic debate, there was some gentle criticism of Obama for being too hawkish in Libya and elsewhere; among Republicans, there was near consensus (with some dissent from Rand Paul) that Obama has been pitifully afraid to use military power.

The gulf is even wider on domestic policy. The Republican candidates all want to repeal Obama’s health reforms, roll back his Wall Street reforms, and undo his tax hikes on high-income Americans. The Democrats all want to protect Obamacare, enact even tougher financial regulations, and raise taxes even higher on the rich. None of the Republicans have endorsed Obama’s carbon rules or any other actions to combat climate change. All of the Democrats except for James Webb (who complained last night that he wasn’t getting enough airtime even though he’s polling at zero percent) have vowed to push even harder than Obama on climate. The Republicans quibbled over who was the most pro-gun, and bragged about their resistance against regulations; the Democrats bickered over who was the most pro-gun-control, bragging about their bad ratings from the National Rifle Association.

Bernie Sanders did complain repeatedly last night that the middle class is getting walloped, a frequent trope during the Republican debate, but he described it as a 40-year problem and blamed it primarily on Republican policies. He also pointed out that the economy was shedding 800,000 jobs a month and the financial system was on the brink of collapse at the end of the George W. Bush presidency, something Donald Trump was the only candidate to mention in the GOP debates. And he agreed with Clinton that Republicans and reporters ought to stop obsessing about her emails and start paying attention to issues like tuition aid and the minimum wage.

None of this is to suggest that the disputes among the Democrats—over the need to reinstate Depression-era firewalls between commercial and investment banking, over lawsuits against gun manufacturers, over Edward Snowden—were meaningless. They were revealing, and so were the disputes among Republicans. But in the larger scheme, they were basically irrelevant to the direction of the country.

There will be an almost infinite amount of political commentary between now and next November, but the basic stakes of the election are already clear. It will pit a Democrat who will try to expand on Obama’s policies, veto Republican legislation, and appoint progressive Supreme Court justices against a Republican who will try to dismantle Obama’s policies, sign Republican legislation and appoint conservative Supreme Court justices. Most of the rest will just be chatter.

“What you heard tonight was a very different debate from the debates you heard from the Republicans,” O’Malley said in his closing statement. That’s because today, the two parties might as well be talking about two different countries.



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