A surge in candidates.

THOUGH it is winter, the earth teems with growth: presidential campaigns, green and hopeful, yearning for victory in Iowa a year from now.

The Democratic field has filled in nicely, with a lower tier that includes Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, Dennis Kucinich, Tom Vilsack, and Bill Richardson. These men have varying credentials and qualities--Biden is a potent senator, with real intelligence--though in presidential terms they are all flyweights, interesting only as they impede other candidates. Vilsack is a former governor of Iowa; Richardson, despite his last name, is Hispanic; both may act as placeholders, tying down blocs of votes. Orbiting above them is Al Gore, who has turned himself into a green holy roller, and could be a factor if he runs.

That leaves three serious candidates in the race so far. John Edwards, Kerry's running mate in 2004, has spent much of his life winning multimillion-dollar judgments from juries. He is attractive, plausible, and shameless; he runs to the left as the tribune of the oppressed. Hillary Clinton hoped to be the candidate of history, America's belated answer to Abigail Adams's request that her husband and his peers "remember the ladies." She has universal name recognition; unfortunately for her, she also has high and unbudging negatives, stemming from her tumultuous years as First Lady, which she has tried to soften by being an attentive, pothole-filling senator. Her announcement that she will begin her candidacy with a "conversation" on issues recalled the "listening tour" she took as a first-time senatorial candidate. What worked in New York State may be harder to pull off nationally. It also suggests the wariness and passivity of panic.

For Mrs. Clinton, and her fellow Democrats, have been blindsided by the third serious candidate, Barack Obama. Have you heard? He's black. But of course you've heard. Obamamania is the latest installment of our national search for what Richard Brookhiser called in these pages the "Numinous Negro"--a salvific black figure whose very being will bind up the nation's racial wounds. Obama is the political equivalent of the character that Morgan Freeman has played in a dozen movies. We should not entirely scorn the impulse to touch the Numinous Negro, for the American presidency is a great prize, and a black man or woman winning it would weigh in the balance of history against great wrongs. But we should also scorn the impulse somewhat, for it is compounded of white self-hatred and white preening. How bad I have been! How good I am now!

What else can Obama run on? He spent eight uneventful years in the Illinois state senate; he had a stroll to the U.S. Senate, thanks to the implosion of all his serious opponents. He is handsome, charming, and well-spoken. That's not enough to play with the big boys (and girl). But all doors fly open for the Numinous Negro.

There is one other quality Obama has to run on, which he shares with every other Democrat: He, and they, are down-the-line liberals. Democrats boast of the diversity of their presidential field: a Hispanic, a woman, a black. In fact their field is as monochromatic as it has ever been. This does not mean the fight will not be vicious. The one issue that will divide them is Iraq. Of course, they and their entire party (except for spectral Democrat Joe Lieberman) oppose the Iraq War. But did they oppose it from Day One? Hillary Clinton didn't; in fact, she was for a troop surge before she was against it. Her opponents, the net-roots, and George Soros won't let her forget it.