Knut Robert Knutsen Bernie Sanders is the first to say that he cannot accomplish everything he WANTS to do without a more progressive congress.
The thing about Sanders is that he has aspirations. An endgame that requires action from the electorate and that requires more progressive candidates to seek congressional office and radical changes to the system. Which is why he calls it a political revolution.
Hillary Clinton has a methodology for what might be possible with a heavily conservative Congress and within the existing system.
She is defeatist.
She might call it pragmatic, and pragmatism is an admirable quality when you’re sitting at the negotiation table weighing your options and measuring the strength you can put behind your positions.
But you do not take that pragmatism to the polls. Voters don’t want to know what you’ll settle for (and it’s piss-poor tactics to announce to your opponents that you’re willing to settle for less) . They want to know what you’ll push for. What you would try to push for with a landslide victory and a filibuster-proof senate.
Clinton isn’t giving them that.
Knut has a very sane view. However, I think he conflates two different things. One is policy, Two is politics.
I suspect that there is nothng that Hillary wants more than achieving a Bernie agenda.
But, to do that (sinbe she expects to be President) she needs to decide what promises that help get here elected might hurt her ability to deliver on the promises?
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There are two approaches to building a movement. One is to build a grass-roots organization, get legislation passed, and then move forward slowly, building the organization as you go. The Civil Rights Movement would be an example of that.
The other approach is to build a movement by winning elections, as Keith describes above. That method is faster and easier. But it is also risky, because the organization’s fortunes rise and fall with vote counts. When you win, you win big. When you lose, you lose big. Sometimes you lose everything. Even in the good times, the organization has a hard time consolidating its gains, because most of the “members” can’t be counted upon to do anything more than talk and vote.
Sanders is obviously going for the second approach.
I suggest there is a third approach …
Party building. In multiparty systems this is easier. Likhud, in Israel, gets its way by building coalitions. Sa,e for Erdogan’s party in Turkey.
This is a harder to do in a two party system like ours. In our system, the leader needs ot also takeover her or his party. Obama’s biggest failure has been his failure to become the effective head of the Dems.
Hillary has much better chance of doing that!