One of the more frustrating features of the way Bernie Sanders and his supporters characterize Hillary Clinton is in the implication that a Democrat taking Wall Street money or support from super PACs is a new phenomenon and unique to the former Secretary of State.
Obama may have been slow to warm to them, but warm he did. And though he was careful initially not to get too close to Priorities USA Action, a group supporting his 2012 re-election, he eventually was forced to recognize the impact super PACs were having and go along, if reluctantly.
As for Wall Street, Hillary Clinton recently pointed to the fact that “President Obama took more money from Wall Street in the 2008 campaign than anyone ever had,” as she argued that it didn’t keep him from regulating the financial sector.
Now, I am not saying that Super PACs and Wall Street money are not a problem, only that Sen. Sanders should be a bit more aware of past practices when he implies that a kind of purity test is required in a Democratic presidential nomination contest.
President Obama is not perfect. Hillary Clinton is not perfect, and if Bernie Sanders ever got to be president, ever had electoral success beyond the confines of Vermont, he and his supporters would discover very quickly that perfection is not to be had.
In an important speech in Chicago last week, President Obama spoke on this theme as he warned Democrats away from adopting a “Tea Party mentality.”
The thing Democrats have to guard against is going in the direction that the Republicans are much further along on, and that is this sense ‘we are just going to get our way, and if we don’t we’ll just canabalize our own, kick them out and try again,'” he said at a meeting with law students in Chicago.
Obama went on to defend his “incrementalist view of politics,” as Jordan Fabian at The Hill called it.
“That’s how change generally happens…It’s not perfect. There is no single-payer, no public option [health care],” he said. If I were designing a system from scratch, it would have been more elegant. But that’s not what was possible in our democracy.”
And perhaps his most important comment,
A lot of Democrats [who] supported me and still support me got frustrated because a bunch of the country doesn’t agree with me or them and they have votes too. And they elect members of Congress. That’s how democracy works…If you don’t get everything you want, it’s not always because the person you elected sold you out. It may just be because in our system, you end up taking half loaves.
Politics is not about perfection, it really is the art of the possible. And in that mythical Bernie Sanders’ administration to which I referred above, I can assure you the disappointment would be palpable, as the tendency to demand everything usually results in the achievement of nothing.