Sanders' Supporters Ignore the Lessons of Obama
DES MOINES -- The sobering reality of Barack Obama's presidency has been the difficulty of achieving the change that he promised. The surprising development of the 2016 campaign is the degree to which a large segment of Democratic voters, at least in the early voting states, appear to have forgotten or rejected that lesson.
They seem willing to entrust their hopes of retaining the presidency to a candidate envisioning change far more radical than anything Obama ever dangled before them.
Bernie Sanders' voters remind me of women who, once the baby is delivered, instantly forget the pain of childbirth and are prepared to do it all over again. Except that this analogy fails when it comes to the question of ultimate payoff. Why would voters, after watching Obama's excruciating experience with congressional Republicans, believe that Sanders could deliver his promised "political revolution"?
For all the fevered Obama-is-a-socialist rhetoric of Republican imaginings, the facts remain that he ran -- and has governed -- largely as a rather centrist, pragmatist Democrat. Sanders is an actual socialist.
Indeed, the 2008 primary campaign featured Obama running to the right of Hillary Clinton when it came to health care, one of the main differences between them. Back then, Clinton was the candidate who insisted that an individual mandate to obtain insurance was key to making an expansion of coverage feasible; Obama's campaign attacked her for a scheme to "go after people's wages."
Recall the hurdles, legal and political, that Obama and fellow Democrats faced in enacting Obamacare. Then ask yourself: How would Sanders manage the massively more daunting feat of enacting a single-payer health care program? Or providing free public college and university tuition for all? Or raising the taxes necessary to pay for everything?
Of course, Sanders' answer to this challenge is to argue that Obama encountered stumbling blocks precisely because his approach was not revolutionary enough.
Obama's problem, in the Sanders analysis, was that he accepted the sail-trimming necessary to work, or try to work, within the existing system; Sanders envisions disrupting it.
More to the point, Clinton's campaign is premised on Obama's approach. She is all about the art of the possible, not the prospect of revolution.
Sanders' strategy is "not just that I have, gee, this idea for childhood poverty," Sanders recently told a Bloomberg Politics breakfast briefing here, dismissing Clinton's earnest incrementalism. Rather, it is to energize bottom-up change, with voters rising up against a corrupt and entrenched media-corporate-political establishment.
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