Post by Logan on Jan 25, 2016 14:56:29 GMT -6
The Hillary Clinton campaign has been engaged in an aggressive effort to accomplish one crucial political goal: Knocking off Bernie Sanders’ halo. One common thread running through many Clinton attacks on Sanders — whether it’s questioning his record on guns or suggesting his single payer dream isn’t going to happen — has been to try to portray Sanders as a conventional politician (after all) who is not quite as pure as the scenes of his rapt, transported crowds suggest and is promising more than he can deliver.
Clinton may have just gotten an assist in this regard from none other than President Barack Obama.
In an interview with Politico’s Glenn Thrush, this exchange happened, after Thrush asked Obama whether Sanders was successfully duplicating the optimistic, transformation-promising message that helped him defeat Clinton in 2008:
THRUSH: I mean, when you watch this, what do you — do you see any elements of what you were able to accomplish in what Sanders is doing?
OBAMA: Well, there’s no doubt that Bernie has tapped into a running thread in Democratic politics that says: Why are we still constrained by the terms of the debate that were set by Ronald Reagan 30 years ago? You know, why is it that we should be scared to challenge conventional wisdom and talk bluntly about inequality and, you know, be full-throated in our progressivism? And, you know, that has an appeal and I understand that.
I think that what Hillary presents is a recognition that translating values into governance and delivering the goods is ultimately the job of politics, making a real-life difference to people in their day-to-day lives. I don’t want to exaggerate those differences, though, because Hillary is really idealistic and progressive. You’d have to be to be in, you know, the position she’s in now, having fought all the battles she’s fought and, you know, taken so many, you know, slings and arrows from the other side. And Bernie, you know, is somebody who was a senator and served on the Veterans’ Committee and got bills done. And so the—
Continued at www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/01/25/make-no-mistake-obama-just-tried-to-undercut-bernie-sanders/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-d%3Ahomepage%2Fstory .
Clinton may have just gotten an assist in this regard from none other than President Barack Obama.
In an interview with Politico’s Glenn Thrush, this exchange happened, after Thrush asked Obama whether Sanders was successfully duplicating the optimistic, transformation-promising message that helped him defeat Clinton in 2008:
THRUSH: I mean, when you watch this, what do you — do you see any elements of what you were able to accomplish in what Sanders is doing?
OBAMA: Well, there’s no doubt that Bernie has tapped into a running thread in Democratic politics that says: Why are we still constrained by the terms of the debate that were set by Ronald Reagan 30 years ago? You know, why is it that we should be scared to challenge conventional wisdom and talk bluntly about inequality and, you know, be full-throated in our progressivism? And, you know, that has an appeal and I understand that.
I think that what Hillary presents is a recognition that translating values into governance and delivering the goods is ultimately the job of politics, making a real-life difference to people in their day-to-day lives. I don’t want to exaggerate those differences, though, because Hillary is really idealistic and progressive. You’d have to be to be in, you know, the position she’s in now, having fought all the battles she’s fought and, you know, taken so many, you know, slings and arrows from the other side. And Bernie, you know, is somebody who was a senator and served on the Veterans’ Committee and got bills done. And so the—
Continued at www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/01/25/make-no-mistake-obama-just-tried-to-undercut-bernie-sanders/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-d%3Ahomepage%2Fstory .
