Iowans go to their caucuses in 13 days and New Hampshire's primaries take place eight days after that. And now, at the head of the stretch, it appears we may be on the cusp of a heck of a show.
Call it Hillary Sadness and Bernie Madness. It could last pretty much an entire month, albeit the short one of February.
The narrative would go as follows: Hillary Clinton's pretty dreams are imperiled because she wants them too much; meanwhile, the distinction between liberalism and Democratic socialism is fading, at least among the white liberals who control Democratic outcomes in Iowa and New Hampshire.
That's a fairly compelling story--the threatened end of Clintonism and its theme of political viability, and the rise of socialism with free college and single-payer health care and a theme that the very essence of Wall Street is corrupt.
Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator and Democratic socialist, has pulled into a lead over Clinton in a couple of late polls in Iowa. He is within close range in the polls in which he trails.
One recent poll in Iowa showed 43 percent of Democratic caucus-goers identify themselves as socialists. Lord have mercy on us all when the Republicans milk that finding in the general election. They will charge that nearly half of Democrats reject capitalism and lean to totalitarian communism.
That won't be true, of course, because socialism in that context is merely a collective public system of services--single-payer health insurance instead of subsidizing Blue Cross--and democratic socialism is merely the right to vote for some version of that.
But what's true doesn't so much matter in contemporary American politics.
Meanwhile, Sanders leads consistently in polls in New Hampshire, which is a tiny place next door to his tiny place, Vermont, both in the Boston television market.
"When is Hillary going to realize," a man asked me the other day, "that people don't want her to be president?"
Yes, it was a man who asked that, which reminds me that the latest poll in Iowa showing the biggest lead (five points) for Sanders--by Quinnipiac--gives Bernie an even bigger lead among Iowa Democratic men than the healthy one Hillary holds among Iowa Democratic women.
These are liberal men, old-line farmer Democrats and Midwestern progressives. These aren't Bubbas. And Hillary bugs them too.
I know Clinton to be smart. I know her to be analytical. I know her to be tough. I've seen her unpleasant. Her public manner doesn't always convey genuineness. She knows that too many people don't much like her.
But she also knows she has one good last chance to be president.
All she needs is to dispose of this Sanders inconvenience in the primary and then draw a scary and polarizing Republican opponent like Donald Trump or Ted Cruz.
Trump and Sanders can become president only if they are lucky enough to face each other in the fall. In that event one of them would have to win. The question would be which would frighten less--the avuncular if high-decibel old socialist or the egomaniacal blowhard and demagogue?
For the moment, with Hillary possessing a strong lead over Sanders in nationwide polls, what I wrote in July holds up:
"So let's just put it out there: Sanders could come close to Clinton in Iowa, or even beat her, and then, as a senator from small, neighboring Vermont in a television market shared from Boston, run her a real race in New Hampshire.
"The best analysis of the effect of that came the other day to the New York Times from Joe Trippi, a veteran Democratic strategist who ran Howard Dean's campaign in 2004.
"'Certainly she could lose Iowa,' Trippi said. If that happened, he said, 'Mostly they'd just have to ride out the punditry and people with their hair on fire' and go on to capture the nomination."
Establishment strength and black voting, the latter of which hardly exists in Iowa and New Hampshire, and which fortify the Clinton campaign and reject the Sanders one, should resettle things for Hillary. That would begin with caucuses in Nevada on Feb. 20, then go on to a primary in South Carolina on Feb. 27, then move to the big Southern primary feast of March 1 taking place in Alabama and Georgia and Tennessee and Oklahoma and Texas and Arkansas.
Then would come super delegates nearly en masse declaring for her.
If she can hold on and nip Sanders in Iowa, the media frenzy won't much commence. But if he beats her ... well, as Trippi put it, all you can do is ride out the freak-out from people pulling their hair out.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 01/19/2016