Why GOP candidates are using Clinton as a dartboard

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The scene from the Democratic presidential field for 2016: A big black van, tinted glass on all sides, tooling through Iowa, stopping to let those on board talk with tiny groups of voters. The scene from the Republican presidential field for 2016: A big ballroom in the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Nashua, N.H, where 19 candidates struggled for a moment in the Klieg lights.

In Iowa, Hillary Clinton stopped in for a chai tea in the tiny town of Le Claire (population 3,765) and then talked about students' college debt in Monticello (which has 31 more people than Le Claire).

In New Hampshire, entrepreneur and big-mouth Donald Trump appeared between a Rhodes Scholar who turned down both the Harvard Medical School and the Yale Law School (Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana) and the protégé of Senator John McCain who was a judge advocate in the U.S. Air Force and has served two decades in the Congress (Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina). Mr. Trump spoke about old-age pension supplements, America's declining role in the world and barriers to U.S. trade overseas.

There never has been an American presidential election quite like this one.

One party has no bench. The other party has no starting lineup. One party has a front-runner who will be 69 years old by Election Day (former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton). The other party has a candidate who was only 13 months old when the Watergate scandal began (Senator Marco Rubio of Florida). One party almost certainly will run the first female presidential nominee. The other party has two candidates who are the sons of Latino immigrants and a third, fluent in Spanish, married to a woman who grew up in Leon, Mexico, and whose maiden name was Columba Garnica de Gallo.

Ms. Clinton placed third in Iowa in the 2008 presidential caucuses. She's running a campaign that wins big media attention through teeny political events – a gambit that allows her to speak, one on one, with ordinary voters even as she wins extraordinary coverage for doing so. At the same time, the Republicans are speaking to big groups but their message is being diffused because their field of candidates is so big.

The contrast is sharp, and so, at this early stage, is the rhetoric. Ms. Clinton's unusual announcement ritual – a canned video full of smiling faces of Americans taking on big challenges, followed by her assertion that she's "getting ready to do something, too" – was greeted with canned derision from her putative Republican rivals.

Mr. Rubio singled her out in his announcement speech, only a day later, painting her as an unwelcome apparition from a far-away past. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, another Republican candidate, put out a video describing the former senator and first lady as someone who "represents the worst of the Washington machine." It got worse from there, reaching a crescendo at the New Hampshire conclave on the weekend.

The peculiar contours of this presidential race make the Democratic front-runner something of a dartboard for Republican candidates, who seem determined to out-do each other in expressions of opprobrium for her, even though Karl Rove, the Republican guru who advised George W. Bush, has cautioned party leaders that building support for the party was more important than tearing down the other party's likely nominee. One reason for the focus on Ms. Clinton: There are so many Republican candidates that focusing on any one of them – with the possible exception of Jeb Bush, vulnerable as a symbol of dynastic politics and of apparent feckless moderation – makes little sense.

So it's bombs away on Ms. Clinton, who, according to the Bloomberg Politics Poll taken this month, has a 48/44 favorable/unfavorable rating from the American people. Even so, she is the straw that is stirring the political drink so far, and there isn't a Republican struggling for attention who wouldn't swap places with her.

But right now this is, as the astute Hollywood political analyst Jerry Seinfeld might put it, a campaign about nothing. Ms. Clinton is issuing vague comments about how the deck is stacked against ordinary Americans while the Republicans as a group are so unfocused that they seem to be a blur for ordinary Americans.

You can't tell all those Republican players without a scorecard, and the roster seems to be changing constantly. Is Governor Mike Pence of Indiana going to run? Isn't Governor John Kasich of Ohio on his second trip to New Hampshire, site of the first primary next year, in only a few weeks?

The Republican campaign eventually will sort itself out, but it won't happen by Oct. 19. That's when Canadians will go to the polls – and when the Republican field could be winnowed from 19 to, say, 14. Goodbye, Donald Trump. But beyond that it's anyone's guess who runs, and who wins.