It has been interesting to watch the way that support for Bernie Sanders as the Democratic party candidate for president in 2016 has grown so dramatically during the last several months.
Many people, especially young people, seem to like his far left-leaning philosophy. They like his proposal to bring universal government-funded health insurance to America, and they like his proposals designed to address the wildly out-of-whack distribution of wealth, college affordability, gay, lesbian and transgender rights, as well as his ideas to protect the environment. In many ways, his proposals are very “warm and fuzzy,” “everybody wins” types of proposals. Well, to be honest, calling them “everybody wins” may be an overstatement, as they will not likely be viewed as “everybody wins” by the top 1-3% of the wealthiest Americans, even the members of that group could very well afford to pay the higher taxes required to enact those proposals.
However, there is no chance that any of his proposals would ever pass successfully through the kind of Republican-dominated Congress that we have seen so fervently and consistently work against Democratic President Obama since his inauguration in January 2009. The idea that Sanders’ far-left and admittedly “Democratic Socialist” proposals have a greater chance of passing through Congress than the proposals that President Obama has put forth to Congress is completely unrealistic.
Could this be a reflection of the popularity of Sanders versus Hillary Clinton among the younger demographic groups? A recent poll, as reported in the New York Times, “primary voters under 45 favoring Mr. Sanders by a roughly 2-to-1 ratio.” Does this mean that voters under 45 are simply unrealistic? That is likely the case.
The Times article included a quote that is likely representative, “‘I like Bernie’s sincerity,” Dalton Paget, 27, an insurance agent from Spokane, Wash., said in a follow-up interview. ‘He’s talking about working towards policies that he’s been championing for a long time.’”
Sanders may well have been championing these policies for a long time, but the fact remains that those policies have even less chance of being passed in any recognizable form by the Republican-majority House and Senate than those policies promoted by President Obama.
Hillary Clinton has argued that she is the stronger candidate because although she is progressive, she is a “progressive who likes to make progress.” This means that Hillary believes that making the kinds of reforms Sanders would like to make is unrealistic. Her approach is far more pragmatic. It appears that her pragmatism is one of the reasons that she has received endorsements from newspapers (including the New York Times) and organizations that understand that effective statecraft requires making sacrifices to ideological purity in favor of political realism.
Although Clinton’s lead over Sanders has tightened in recent weeks, it appears that her pragmatic approach may carry the day. We will watch the primary process play out over the next several months to learn whether or not this is the case.
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