GEORGE H.W. BUSH was a terrible campaigner and a rather good president. One, possibly apocryphal, story about his awkwardness in front of a crowd involves a campaign stop in a New Hampshire town that had recently seen job losses. On the way in Mr Bush was, supposedly, handed a card by an aide which read, “Message: I care”. The candidate took to the stage and started saying, “Message: I care”, like some pre-programmed robo-Wasp. Hillary Clinton’s appearance on "Face the Nation" at the weekend had a certain H.W. quality. She has been told by aides that she needs to remind Americans that she is a real person. “I am a real person,” she told the host, John Dickerson.
That Mrs Clinton is not great at campaigning ought to come as no surprise to anyone who watched her previous attempt to win the Democratic nomination. As with Mr Bush, this does not necessarily mean she would be a bad president. But it does help to explain Democrats’ enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders, which has reached Trump-like levels in some polls. Mr Sanders is a puzzle for people trying to decide which campaigns to give most attention to. The Economist put Donald Trump on the cover but currently has no plans to give Mr Sanders the same treatment. Why the inconsistency?
The answer is that their poll numbers bear only a superficial resemblance. Questions that ask about voting intentions don’t count for much so early in the cycle: money, endorsements and prediction markets are a more reliable guide. YouGov, which does polling for The Economist, asks the voting intention question anyway. But they also asks respondents who is going to get the nomination. The answers show that the way Democrats view Mr Sanders and Republicans view Mr Trump are very different (the fieldwork was done before Scott Walker pulled out of the race).
For all the thousands turning up to cheer Mr Sanders, Democrats are in a more pragmatic mood than Republicans. That may be because when a party controls the presidency it tends to remain a bit more disciplined. It may also be because Republicans are in a strange place at the moment. When Bobby Jindal, a state governor, McKinsey alumnus and Rhodes scholar feels he has to tell the audience at a debate that he is “angrier at the Republicans in DC than I am at the president”, you know that something deeply odd is happening. Despite his slight dip following the second televised Republican debate, Mr Trump still captures that mood on the right better than any other candidate, for now at least. Politics is not always symmetrical. On the left, there really is no equivalent.
