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Now here's a sobering thought: In less than a year, either a reality-TV star who flubs Bible verses but who just dragged out the queen of non-sequiturs to boost his evangelical cred, or a Canadian-born flame thrower who constantly invokes Christ but who would "carpet bomb" innocent civilians in the Middle East, could be the world's most powerful leader.

The next U.S. president will be sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017, and, with 11 days to go before the Iowa caucuses, the Republican nomination is essentially a race between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Betting markets have put the most money on Mr. Trump, with Florida Senator Marco Rubio still seen, more implausibly by the day, as the only other candidate capable of crashing the Trump-a-palooza.

The race is so heated between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz in Iowa that the real estate mogul hauled out Sarah Palin on Tuesday to prove to evangelicals that he's no godless elitist. Ms. Palin may ultimately go down as an unfortunate political footnote. But until then, few Republicans can apparently rile-up true believers like the Alaska hockey mom with the syntax of a less contemplative Yoda.

To wit, as she put it in her endorsement of Mr. Trump: "And he, who would negotiate deals, kind of with the skills of a community organizer maybe organizing a neighbourhood tea, well, he deciding that, 'No, America would apologize as part of the deal,' as the enemy sends a message to the rest of the world that they capture and we kowtow, and we apologize, and then, we bend over and say, 'Thank you, enemy.'"

Until recently, the one consolation the world could take from this strange turn in U.S. politics was that Hillary Clinton, a known quantity with a head on her shoulders, would be the Democratic nominee and make mincemeat next November of whichever wacko bird got the GOP nod.

This lulled the Clinton campaign into believing its own press. For months, it treated Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders as one would a curmudgeonly but harmless uncle whose crusades for socialized medicine and free universities would be dismissed by even the most idealist liberal Democrats as the lost causes of an unreconstructed old hippie – a self-described socialist in a country allergic to the term, to boot.

Even as Mr. Sanders began filling arenas, firing up millennials on social media and raising almost as much money as Ms. Clinton – without relying on super PACs or Wall Street – the former secretary of state mostly ignored him and treated campaigning as a formality. She now faces potential losses to Mr. Sanders in Iowa and New Hampshire and serious doubts about her preparedness for a general election.

Mr. Sanders may be the anti-Trump, and endearingly authentic in his own right, but the two men share a blow-it-all-up-and-start-over absolutism that attracts voters who think Washington is bought, sold and broken. Try as she might, Ms. Clinton cannot shatter the impression that she is a status quo candidate.

She has come by her incrementalism honestly. As the former first lady who bears the scars of her failed 1994 attempt to reform U.S. health care, when the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies waged war on her plan to regulate how employers provide health coverage, Ms. Clinton knows that Congress and the country will never embrace a Canadian-style, single-payer health-care system.

Mr. Sanders's plan to abolish private insurance and replace it with a single, government-run health-insurance system – extending the existing public Medicare system for seniors to all U.S. residents, while abolishing current deductibles – is beyond pie-in-the-sky.

Medicare is financially unsustainable as it is. The majority of Americans, with employer-provided health insurance, don't trust government to replace their coverage with a universal public plan. They've already experienced rising premiums and deductibles as private insurers, which were forced to offer coverage to the sickest patients under President Barack Obama's health-care law, spread the costs to them. Ms. Clinton knows the next Democratic president will need to fight just to preserve Obamacare.

Still, Mr. Sanders's plan has the aspirational clarity that successful insurgent campaigns are made of. "This campaign is about a political revolution not only to elect the president, but to transform this country," he said during Sunday's Democratic debate in South Carolina.

Against this, Ms. Clinton offers a "sensible, achievable agenda." It may be the one honest thing about her campaign. But it doesn't make anyone feel the burn.

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