IS HILLARY CLINTON preparing a run for the White House? Before pondering that timely question, consider another which may matter just as much. Why would any Democrat want to become president in 2016?

Mrs Clinton is certainly giving people cause to ask the first question. Before too long, she will need to answer the second. On September 14th she headed to Iowa for the first time since her wounding defeat by Barack Obama in that state’s 2008 Democratic caucus. The former secretary of state, senator and First Lady made her return in a friendly, controlled setting. Accompanied by her husband, Bill, she was the guest star at the Harkin Steak Fry, a combined picnic, fundraiser and clan gathering for fans and friends of Tom Harkin, Iowa’s Democratic senator and an old-school New Deal populist.

No national politician heads to Iowa on a whim. Winning Iowa’s first-in-the-nation presidential contest does not sew up the nomination. But losing Iowa badly (in 2008 Mrs Clinton came third behind Mr Obama and John Edwards, a caddish lawyer) can derail a campaign built round inevitability. Senator Harkin tried to consign that rejection to history, calling the Clintons America’s “comeback couple” and, to Iowa Democrats, “family”.

Mr Harkin is retiring after 40 years in Congress. The Clintons were at pains not to overshadow their host. They used his-and-hers speeches to heap praise on Mr Harkin, bash Republicans and urge Democrats to vote in November’s mid-term elections. The lovely setting, a sloping meadow bathed in autumn sunshine, had been decorated with similar care. There were old tractors, artfully placed hay bales, a giant flag and rows of campaign signs promoting mid-term candidates. “Ready for Hillary”, a shadow campaign group working to assemble an army of grassroots activists for Mrs Clinton if she decides to run, bused hundreds of volunteers and Iowa students to the site, just outside Indianola. Tactfully, the group had lined the site with signs declaring “Thank You Tom!” and “Ready”, and making no explicit mention of their heroine or 2016 (though the signs’ colours were laden with meaning, with sky-blue lettering giving way to exclamation marks in a grown-up shade of pink).

Before her speech Mrs Clinton chatted, gingerly, with a crowd of over 100 penned-in reporters, pretending not to hear yelled-out questions about her presidential ambitions. Once on stage she was a bit more direct, admitting that she was “thinking about” the presidency. Strikingly, she earned only a handful of real cheers: when she walked onstage, when dropping 2016 hints, and when she defended women’s rights. Before the end of her workmanlike speech, activists began heading for the exits. Judging by the badges and banners they carried, these were Democrats pleased by the general idea of a fresh Clinton candidacy. Yet at that precise moment they also looked a little bored, and mostly focused on beating the traffic.

When straw-polled, quite a few Iowa Democrats seem content with that level of commitment, for now. They sound mainly intrigued by that first basic question—is Mrs Clinton running?—and in quite a tokenistic way. This was true of several students at Drake University in Des Moines, waiting to board a free bus to the steak fry, laid on by “Ready for Hillary”. Many said America needed to show it could elect a woman president. Young people are excited by novelty, added a first-year advertising student: “We’ve had a black president, now what’s next?”

Other Democrats are willing to grapple with the second question cited at the start: why would they want the presidency in 2016? Democrats could be termed the party of people, with an edge in the nationwide popular vote, at least on the one day every four years when the White House is at stake. Beyond the Democrats’ urban strongholds, Republicans are the party of territory, dominating vast swathes of rural and suburban America. Combine that with congressional district maps not due to be redrawn before 2020, and a President Hillary would be likely to face—at a minimum—a Republican-held House of Representatives and years of divided government.

Alas, divided government is not currently working. Mrs Clinton’s husband has a talent for defining the political issue of the moment, and proved it again at the steak fry. America faces a puzzling problem, he mused in his speech. “We are less racist, sexist and homophobic than we’ve ever been.” At the same time: “We don’t want to be around anyone who disagrees with us.” Put another way, even as some big divisive arguments lose their potency, partisan divisions are growing ever sharper.

Post-hope politics

Such gridlock alarms thoughtful Iowa Democrats, it turns out, to the point of undermining the received wisdom that voters hate Washington and all its works. Those Democrats—the ones who wonder what Mrs Clinton might do as president—were united in praising her experience, not just in government and the Senate, but in the wheeling-’n’-dealing Clinton White House. In 2008 Mr Obama “took us by storm”, sighed a long-time activist. Hope and change was a “wonderful slogan”, she added—but after Mr Obama’s idealism it is time for “cold, hard facts”, and a president ready to cut deals from day one. A church minister urged the former First Lady to run as a “hard-nosed pragmatist”, offering, in effect, “a third term of Bill Clinton”. A 19-year-old student, describing Mrs Clinton’s strengths, ventured: “Her involvement in Washington politics is a lot longer than President Obama’s.” A handful openly regretted their 2008 support for Mr Obama.

Democrats are sure that Hillary Clinton would be a formidable presidential contender. They nearly all blame Republicans for Washington’s dysfunction. But a deep fear gnaws at them, and spilled into the open in Iowa: what if a Democrat can win the White House, then finds the country ungovernable?