A funny thing happened on the way to Senator Clinton’s primary win Tuesday night in Pennsylvania, her party started moving back toward reality on the war. It may not be all the way, yet. but it turned in the right direction. And it’s not just that the former first lady’s campaign ran ads asking whether Senator Obama was ready to handle international crises as a president and featuring, for the first time of any ads in the campaign, the image of Osama bin Laden. Mrs. Clinton herself began to come back to reality on the next front — Iran.

In a series of television interviews in the two days before the vote, Mrs. Clinton made it clear that were she president, she would authorize a devastating retaliation against Iran if it attacked Israel. In response to a question from Christopher Cuomo on Tuesday’s Good Morning America, the New York senator said, “I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran. In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”

Now she’s talking, and, voila, the votes started coming her way. They followed her veering away from the caution she’d been voicing but six months ago. At the October 30 debates at Philadelphia, she declined to state any conditions ahead of time where she would use force against Iran. At one point she even said, “The Republicans are waving their sabers and talking about going after Iran. I want to prevent a rush to war.”

Senator Obama has not gone as far on the Iran front, though even he subtly changed his rhetorical emphasis. When asked about his stated position that he would be open to meeting with Iranian leaders at a meeting with Philadelphia Jewish leaders last Wednesday, the senator said, “My interest in meeting with Iran is practical; it is not based on my assessment of who they are or my judgment about their values, but rather it is a practical assessment in terms of how we can best achieve our ultimate goal, which is an Iran that is not threatening its neighbors, is not threatening Israel, does not possess nuclear weapons, is not funding organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas.”

This may seem rather, how could one put it, naive or even flakey, and it may leave the hard-headed Jewish leaders rolling their eyes. But what strikes us is Mr. Obama’s acknowledgment that Iran is a threat and must be countered. It is a far cry from his attacks on Mrs. Clinton last fall for helping to enable Republican war mongering by voting for a non-binding resolution that urged the White House to designate the Iran’s Quds Force as a terrorist entity.

The shift on Iran for the two leading Democrats also tells us about the war for the soul of their party. One faction believes that Iran is not a threat to world peace and that to describe Iranian behavior in such terms is to monger fear. But quite a few Democrats know that such nonsense is a recipe for electoral defeat. No doubt many Democrats expect the next president to confront the Iranian threat instead of pretending it does not exist. And a big margin of them, it turns out, live in Pennsylvania.