opinion

Our Editorial: Dem debate will reveal party’s left turn

Tonight, Democratic presidential candidates get their turn on the debate stage, switching the cameras away for a moment from Donald Trump and the Republican field. The nation may be surprised by what it hears.

So far in the campaign, political analysts have been obsessed with the variety show that has been the crowded Republican contest, parsing what it means that outsiders like Trump, Dr. Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina are dominating the polls. A ton has been written about how Ted Cruz and other ultra conservatives are pulling the party further to the right.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are staging their own circus. If Republicans are becoming more conservative to appeal to their base, they pale in comparison to Democrats, who are offering their most liberal agenda in a presidential race in decades.

Frontrunner Hillary Clinton, reeling from the email server investigation and questions about her handling of Benghazi, is showing all the signs of a desperate candidate making really strange decisions.

She has abandoned the centrism that worked so well for her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and is chasing challenger Bernie Sanders into the deep woods of the radical left. The lower her poll numbers sink, the more she morphs into a fire-breathing progressive.

Sanders, a socialist, is the Independent senator from Vermont. He advocates higher taxes and bigger government. He also is a collectivist who has little regard for private property rights and disdains the American corporations that keep Americans working.

Clinton has become his echo.

After helping craft President Barack Obama’s Pacific trade deal as secretary of state, Clinton is now against the free trade it represents. She opposes the Keystone XL pipeline, even though her own State Department determined its environmental impact would be minimal. And she’s advocating a confiscatory 36 percent capital gains tax, which will further slow a sluggish economy.

The other candidates who will be on tonight’s debate stage, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb and former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee, are of much the same ilk. At this point, the Democrats couldn’t find mainstream America with a telescope.

How revelatory tonight’s debate proves to be will depend greatly on the performance of CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who will be asking the questions.

If Cooper subjects the Democratic debaters to the same tough queries Republicans have faced, Clinton will spend much of her time explaining why she kept a private email server, and why she’s been caught in so many falsehoods in her previous explanations. She should also be asked to address the contradictions in her Benghazi story, and the relationship between the State Department and her family’s Clinton Foundation while she was in office.

Sanders and her other opponents have been unwilling to attack Clinton. But CNN should not allow this to be a love fest. There are hard questions to be put to Democrats, both individually and as a group.

The wild card, of course, is whether Vice President Joe Biden shows up tonight. CNN has said he’s welcome to join the debate at the last-minute should he decide to enter the presidential race.

If that happens today, Democrats have a chance of blowing past the record ratings of the first Republican face-off, and of staging a debate that’s worth watching.