Say this for Democrats: They never do anything the easy way.

This year’s presidential election illustrates the point. With George W. Bush a prime candidate for worst president ever and polls suggesting the Republican label is a lethal liability, Democrats could have walked into the White House behind a conventional nominee.

A reasonably well-known and likable white guy with a moderate political record, a sensible national health care plan, no skeletons (male or female) in the closet and maybe a bit of military service (helpful but not necessary) would have done the trick nicely. But that would have been the easy way, not the Democrats’ way.

Instead, Democrats are about to do what they always do – test the limits of American tolerance, this time by nominating either a woman who bears more negative baggage than the Wicked Witch of the West or a black man whose middle name is Hussein and whose grandfather was Muslim.

Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are formidable candidates, gifted with keen intelligence and the ability to formulate and express complex ideas and attract hosts of dedicated followers. But the election of either would shatter long-standing convention, something not easily or painlessly achieved, as such other pathfinders (Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy come to mind) found.

But it’s also what we’ve come to expect of the Democratic Party. For almost eight decades now, beginning with Franklin Roosevelt, virtually every significant initiative or change of direction in American politics has originated in the caldron of ideas – some good, some bad – that is the Democratic Party. (Ronald Reagan could be the one Republican exception.)

Prior to FDR, the federal agenda was devoid of serious social welfare policy. He changed all that, notably with Social Security, the most successful domestic program in the country’s history. Medicare and Medicaid, housing and urban aid, poverty, farm support and rural electricity programs and civil rights legislation, the party’s crowning achievement – all were products of Roosevelt or his Democratic successors.

Few would oppose these programs now, except to argue for needed amendment or modernization. But in the beginning most were fiercely opposed, usually by Republicans but even by some conservative Democrats, and on occasion Democrats paid a fierce price for breaking with convention on such issues. Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation made Democrats pariahs in the South for the better part of a generation, as he had predicted, and perennial presidential underdogs.

So, too, with the Vietnam War. The debate over the war never touched the GOP. It was waged entirely inside the Democratic Party, culminating in the tumultuous 1968 national convention that contributed to the party’s loss of the White House to Richard Nixon. Republicans were irrelevant to the Vietnam debate, as they have been for almost a century to most innovation and change in this country.

It didn’t have to be that way. At the start of the 20th century, Republicans boasted such prominent voices for progressivism and change as President Teddy Roosevelt and George L. Record, a Jersey City lawyer who influenced both the national GOP and the Democratic governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson. But for most of the last century, Republicans – with the notable exception of Reagan and the misunderstood Nixon – have stood fast for the status quo.

That’s no bad mark against the GOP. A nation as dynamic and diverse and ever-changing as this one, needs a political party and institutions that instinctively challenge change and demand that new ideas meet hard tests of reason and practicality. That’s a proper role for the GOP. But such a country also needs a political party and institutions willing to clear out the underbrush of stale ideas to make way for new ones.

And that’s the proper role for the Democratic Party. But it’s not one that history often rewards with electoral success, at least not at the outset. That’s the hurdle that Democrats face in this election.

American voters, roughly two-thirds of whom are not Democrats, will have to shed biases of gender and/or race as well as political allegiance to elect Obama or Clinton. It won’t be easy. Indeed, it will be made even harder by the likely selection of John McCain as the GOP nominee, simply because McCain isn’t your garden-variety Republican conservative.

Nobody’s quite sure what kind of conservative McCain is. But he softens the GOP image enough to provide an election alternative for those who don’t like what they do know about Clinton or fear what they don’t know about Obama. He gives them cover.

Considering the Bush record, a Democrat, Clinton or Obama, should be favored to win the White House this fall. But even if they fall short, their campaigns have given us a vision of the future and the fresh possibility that, if not this year, then sometime soon, a woman or an African-American will occupy the Oval Office. That’s the Democratic Party’s natural role, and it’s never an easy one.

John Farmer is national political correspondent for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be contacted at [email protected].