Whether you support her policy prescriptions or not, there’s no doubt that Tulsi Gabbard’s presidential campaign offers a breath of fresh air in a field of insufferable Democratic candidates prone to grandstanding, moralizing, and identity-politics-infused virtue signaling.

A rarity in 2019, Gabbard has campaigned on issues, not just various schemes to give things away for free.

Her campaign has focused on foreign policy, speaking from a veteran’s perspective to make the case for a restrained approach to intervention abroad. She’s also spoken at length about criminal justice reform, the drug war, and other issues that impact the lives of all Americans.

But notably, she rejects identity politics out-of-hand. She explicitly confirmed as much over the weekend during an appearance on political commentator Dave Rubin’s show, The Rubin Report. As reported by the Washington Examiner, Gabbard said, “Identity politics that are being used, again, to further divide us, to further drive separations between us, and purely for selfish political gain, is a real danger.” She went on to blast her competitors for pandering by speaking broken Spanish on the Democratic debate stage and said identity politics “undermines unity.”

Fantastic response to my chat with @TulsiGabbard. Will the DNC let her back in the debates? Stay tuned!https://t.co/r34MhlbSkD pic.twitter.com/aeJ0hElQTD — Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) September 9, 2019

Instead, Gabbard campaigns in a way that’s intentionally appealing to Americans of all political stripes. She strives for, in her words , “that unity that we have in recognizing our diversity and our strength and who we are as Americans and the principles and freedoms that make up the bedrock of our country.”

She even agreed with Rubin when he said identity politics was “the most dangerous force in American politics today” and “the reverse of what the American Dream was founded on.”

Yet if you’ve watched the way Gabbard campaigns, this doesn’t come as a surprise.

Gabbard supports gay rights but doesn’t post cringey pandering videos à la Kirsten Gillibrand. She’s dedicated to fighting for racial justice, but she doesn’t go around acting like all Republicans are racists. She’s staunchly liberal on the issues, but she reaches out beyond her ideological zone to all Americans, even managing to find some common ground with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.

Naturally, then, the Democratic establishment hates her. She does what they refuse to do.

Gabbard does not see the world through the lens of identity or revile her political opponents. In fact, she has stressed the cross-partisan appeal of her candidacy, saying, “The fact that we're already seeing Democrats, Republicans, independents, libertarians, progressives, conservatives coming out to join my campaign. ... [shows] the kind of unifying movements that we will have in defeating Donald Trump.”

Among today’s woke elite, her willingness to appeal to and work with deplorables makes Gabbard persona non grata.

So, too, does the Hawaii congresswoman’s stance on impeachment. While other 2020 Democrats such as Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren feign outrage at all times and call for Trump's ouster, Gabbard takes a more tempered approach. She stressed that it’s “important for us to think about what is in the best interest of the country and the American people, and continuing to pursue impeachment is something that I think will only further tear our country apart.”

"Continuing to pursue impeachment is something that I think will only further to tear our country apart."@TulsiGabbard says Democrats are wrong to threaten @realDonaldTrump with calls for his removal from office https://t.co/Xn3OgY0xwd — Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) September 9, 2019

She is, of course, exactly right. Democrats should be thinking about beating Trump, not tearing the country apart by impeaching him. Not that that matters to the other Democratic candidates, who think impeachment might help them get nominated. But this is exactly the difference between Gabbard and her Democratic cohorts.

Whether you agree with her on the issues (and I don’t most of the time) or not, Gabbard is at least sincere and believes that principle is a higher value than identity. That alone makes her stand out from this 2020 field.