DES MOINES – Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is too experienced, Sen. Barack Obama too raw. Listening to Democrats give their Goldilocks view of the 2008 presidential campaign must make voters wonder: Will any candidate be just right for the White House?

“Senator Obama does represent change. Senator Clinton has experience. Change and experience,” New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said Sunday, making a balancing gesture with his hands. “With me, you get both.”

Richardson may be a long shot for the nomination, but his crack underscored a question that dominated the latest presidential debate: A change versus experience dynamic that almost surely will determine who represents the Democratic Party next year.

Obama, a first-term senator only three years out of the Illinois Legislature, casts himself as a change agent who would overcome the nation’s broken political system. He hopes to make Clinton’s three decades in politics a detriment.

Clinton, a former first lady who entered the Senate as her husband left the White House, said she is the lone candidate with enough experience to enact change.

Values such as change and experience come into play when candidates have little else to debate.

“It’s not unusual that this campaign comes down to qualities of a candidate because, when you get down to it, their policy differences aren’t all that great,” said Arthur Sanders, professor and chairman of the department of politics and international relations at Drake University.

Their change and experience narratives could backfire on Obama and Clinton.

For example, the audience of highly partisan Iowa Democrats sat stoney faced with their arms crossed when Obama pledged to tackle the nation’s big problems in a bipartisan way.

And the former first lady frustrates her more senior rivals, such as Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, who cannot understand why she is carrying the experience banner.

After all, Clinton has never run a company or a government, and her signature public policy – health care reform – failed in 1993.

“The question is not just what is your experience,” Dodd told the AP, “but what have you succeeded in doing with your experience?”

He said voters who care about health care should ask Clinton, “Why did you not succeed?”

Experience will not change that question.