Obviously, we aren’t seeing that sort of campaign occur between Clinton and Trump. But honestly, Bernie Sanders didn’t appear to relish such a respectable match-up either. And I don’t know why that is. 
 
While trading worst-election-ever woes recently with a friend of mine - a Bernie fan - he said he felt the low moments of this thing started in the primary, when - as he put it - "the DNC was doing its worst to keep that damned Democratic Socialist out of the top seat." That prompted me to reflect on the primaries through the prism of what we're seeing now, and two things have occurred to me.
 
One, it's clearer to me than ever that Bernie Sanders beat himself in that race. No matter how pushy and entrenched you consider the DNC to be, their maneuvering didn't keep Bernie Sanders from being a competitive primary contender. The proof? Sanders was a competitive primary contender. He just didn't win.
 
My second thought is that he didn't win because for whatever reason, when faced with running for office against Hillary Clinton, he chose to run against the idea of Hillary Clinton, rather than against her political views and objectives. I wonder if he was even conscious of doing this. Was he more confident running against her reputation than laying his views out next to hers and selling them? That was my suspicion during the primaries; that he hadn’t fleshed out his proposals enough to challenge hers, and was relying on emotional rhetoric to win support instead. The worst part was that Sanders’ idea of Hillary Clinton was in sync with the conservative idea of Hillary Clinton.

Interpersonally, Sanders and Clinton treated each other with mutual respect, often even apparent warmth. They both made note often of the places where their politics overlapped. But mentally scrolling back through the content of his case against Clinton, it's hard to find Sanders charging her with anything other than moral failure.
 ​

I hate to reduce the Bernie Sanders campaign to unpreparedness, but his trouble can’t be chalked up to the DNC. There is no support for the hapless underdog argument that Sanders was strong-armed out of the nomination. A look back at the hard-fought, noisy, brightly-lit 2016 Democratic primaries hardly yields a picture of a David and Goliath scenario. There was no silencing of an upstart; no sense of pressure (obviously!) for Democrats to fall in line quietly. Bernie wasn't forced to campaign from the fringes with homemade signs while Hillary stood alone, center stage. In fact, Bernie’s supposed outsider (!) status gave him more currency than it did disadvantages. There were several dozen high-profile, nationally-covered speeches, town halls, rallies, and interviews, and of course, the debates. The campaigns both had equally well-funded ground games and air time, and equally high-end trappings and accouterments, like slick and attractive websites, ads, slogans, logos, etc. 

Sanders may have started out a seeming long shot, but he quickly blew past O'Malley and Chaffee and Webb and fired up what was for many millions a breathtakingly exciting movement. It should still cheer his supporters to note how he didn't allow money in politics and a powerful party structure to keep him out of the running. Sanders was an unexpectedly strong candidate - a powerful adversary to Clinton. He showed a dazzling ability to raise competitive funding through individual small donors.There is no case to make that he would have won with a big enough platform - he had one, and was able to stay in contention to the bitter end. If it was the intent of the DNC to use Establishment muscle to keep Sanders out of the running in the 2016 Democratic primary, they did a lousy job. 

The only thing that kept him from being truly competitive against Clinton was that his strengths were more rhetorical than policy-based. That's it. He simply did not demonstrate a breadth and depth of knowledge in the areas pertinent to the responsibilities and opportunities of leading the executive branch. And in place of that knowledge, he ran on casting doubt about Clinton's character.
 
His expressed foreign policy ideas, especially regarding Syria and ISIL, consisted mostly of the proposition that "Muslim countries need to get more involved." He never said "more involved" than what: he didn’t offer assessments of what Jordan was doing compared to what Turkey was doing compared to what Lebanon was doing. He addressed the dynamics of the various competing factions inside Syria in this way during one debate: “...you have this side fighting with that side, that side fighting with this side..." While there are a number of groups with complex alliances, much reporting has been done about who they are and what their objectives are. Up to date, insightful information about the status of these conflicts is handy. Sanders appeared content describing the situation as “a mess”. Listening to him talk about foreign affairs, I frequently felt I knew more about things than he did. I'm a blogger. I don't want to know more about foreign affairs than the president. 
 
Meanwhile, his responses on this topic, as shallow as they were, always managed to include a characterization of Hillary Clinton as a hawk. He didn’t challenge her by practice and plan. For example, he didn’t vocalize objections to her positions on drone use. He couldn’t; when forced to be specific, he granted that drones are a tool that we need to have. He said, like Clinton, that what needs addressing in that regard is policy and transparency. He didn’t describe alternative solutions for international crises which he said Hillary had approached with a heavy fist. For example, he would criticize Clinton as a regime-change enthusiast when referencing the air strikes she supported in Libya, but he wouldn’t say what he would have done in her position. He couldn’t; he has granted the complexity of weighing such a decision when a hostile foreign leader is imminently poised to commence genocide. But immediately coinciding with this acknowledgement of the lose-lose nature of the dilemma, he was unrestrained in casting Clinton as less committed to peace than himself.  

In terms of financial sector reform, the real differences between Sanders and Clinton boiled down to some approachable disagreements on strategy, tactics, rules, terms of measurement and assessment, concentrations of authority, even language. Their values around these issues are shared. They both proposed ways to use the leverage of federal regulation and the courts to continue efforts to defang Wall Street. There are legitimate cases to be made for one regulatory tool over another. Instead of acknowledging their shared goals, and arguing over strategy, Sanders chose to question Clinton's integrity and motivation. Her proposals were consistent with her voting record in the Senate, and they were too detailed to be dismissed as lip service. So it is shocking to remember how, instead of comparing her ideas to his, and saying his would work better, Bernie said, in effect, “She’s trying to trick you. She has no intention of doing any of this. She’s lying when she says she wants to help you.”
 

Between this innuendo, and his full-throated sloganeering, Sanders gave Clinton a run for her money:
 - "Break 'em up!" temporarily edged out “Dodd-Frank doesn’t go far enough because it doesn't touch hedge-fund management or insurance."
 - "Free tuition for all!" garnered more excitement than "We need means-testing for tuition and student debt forgiveness so that everyone who wants to go to college can afford to."
 - "Single payer!" was more of a draw than "Let's build on the ACA and fix its problems, with an eye toward ultimately making a successful sell of universal healthcare to the American people."

Now, politics matters, and there's a lot to be said for charisma. You have to inspire people. And it is legitimate to compare policies in terms of reach. But there was no reason for Sanders and his campaign to meld legitimate political challenges into dark questions about Clinton's idealism, her altruism - about her very motivation. It’s extraordinary, in retrospect. ​

​The Democratic Party primary voter is a savvy animal. Bernie wasn't silenced. Hillary won on the merits of her arguments. Bernie lost because his campaign, weak on substance, bought in to the concept that instead of waging a contest of ideas, one way of running for office against Hillary Clinton is to engage in relentless, nebulous, negative commentary.

​Let’s hope that works for Trump about as well as it did for Sanders. 

Chaotic primaries and quixotic donations aside, nothing is inherently wrong with Bernie Sanders’ choice to stay in the primary race to the convention.

​The Clinton campaign will survive. In the abstract, even where a primary candidate’s efforts might compromise a likely nominee’s odds in the fall, if the candidate is still winning states and challenging the front-runner’s ideas, there shouldn’t be an automatic expectation to withdraw.
 
Concern that Sanders’ criticisms of Clinton will be snagged by the other team and used against her are understandable, but unnecessary. No general election candidate ever beat an opponent by quoting barbs thrown during the primary. A 2016 undecided voter (?!) won’t be drawn to Trump over Clinton because Sanders accused Clinton of being too moderate. And Trump didn't need Sanders’ complaint that Clinton isn’t trustworthy to get him started on that - he was already in line with the rest.
 
At this point, there is also no onus on Sanders to unite the party. His thought is to reform the party, and we’re still in the primaries. For now, it’s a false analogy to judge Sanders as a Nader-like spoiler. So far, (that's as of 5/17/19, for the record) there’s no indication he’d do anything to sabotage a general-election Clinton campaign – in fact he’s explicitly promised to help defeat Trump.
 
There is, however, a glaring (disturbing actually) reason why Sanders’ persistence does no service to the electorate, and may be doing harm. The entire Bernie Sanders for President campaign is based on a false premise.
 
It’s a premise that feeds the worst kind of political cynicism, typified by the misguided disappointment some on the left heaped on Barack Obama once he was in office.
 
It’s a premise whose central theme has gone largely unexamined by millions of voters. It’s routinely accepted by town hall hosts, debate moderators, and the anchors of Sunday morning news shows, who congratulate themselves for challenging Sanders’ assertions with a followup question or two.   

The fundamental proposition of the Bernie Sanders campaign is that Bernie Sanders is a radical. That he is a revolutionary. That he is preeminently prepared to effect major reforms in US governance.

It’s a premise that says Sanders’ proposals are so unfettered by the constraints of conventional thinking, his vision so soaring, his supporters so enterprising and committed, he is poised to forge a previously inconceivable transformation to our current system. 
The Sanders campaign submits that the chief means of reform,
more important than experience or expertise,
more important than depth of knowledge or painstaking policy development,
is the courage to discard orthodoxical thinking and reject a philosophy of cumulative progress and incremental change. This premise insists that a combination of radical thought and political moxy can provide the locomotion necessary to overcome practical barriers to change, and that Bernie Sanders is uniquely qualified to employ such power effectively in the Executive Branch.
 
Intoxicating stuff.

But here is the problem.
There is nothing ground-breaking or original about Sanders’ ideas. He is not a pioneer. He is not a revolutionary.

None of Senator Sanders’ overarching goals set him apart from the liberal mainstream. They can all be found in the Democratic Party Platform, policy positions of freshman to senior members of Congress and the legislation they have toiled over and pushed and sometimes passed: access for all to college, healthcare, and a living wage; the overturn of Citizens United; codified, enforceable solutions to environmental problems; and, absolutely, robust regulation of Wall Street.
 
Certainly, Sanders’ preferred models for these ideals in practice do sit to the left of what the country has so far supported. He wants single-payer health insurance, free college tuition across the board, a $15 federal minimum wage, a carbon tax and a ban on fracking. He hasn’t revealed how he is equipped to advance such policies in our current political climate, but his message is clear: liberals fail to achieve greater progress because of a lack of imagination and a shortage of political courage.

Meanwhile, though, throughout the years, across the Democratic party, many Presidents, presidential candidates, members of Congress, and other progressive leaders perennially raise and scrutinize such ideas. In a case where any one of them believes any one of these models to be ideal, they push it forward and fight for it.
 
There are no new ideas coming from the Sanders camp. And the barriers to liberal progress are not reticence or dispassion.
 
The most conspicuous weakness of the Sanders premise is exposed by his failure to articulate concrete proposals in areas of his central focus. While Sanders can passionately spell out all the ways Wall Street has devastated our economy and vow to dismantle the framework of power held by financial institutions, actual strategies never materialize. In the absence of detail, his approach can’t be evaluated. And where he has occasionally shared rough ideas about how to move forward, Sanders does not differentiate himself from the average Democratic party leader or elected official, and certainly not from his opponent.

​Elsewhere in America, Hillary makes plain her plan for Wall Street reform. Even within the constraints of interviews, debates, and speeches, she has provided more detail than Sanders, and has ensured easy access to the details of her financial reform positions by publishing them on her website. On the Clinton site, while the first thing you find on her "Issues" pages are the brief, fairly canned, requisite policy summaries, at the end of the summary you also find a link to her detail-rich elaborations, laid out on supporting Fact Sheets that are accessible without being reductive. The voter may embrace Clinton’s positions or not, but will find the means on the Fact Sheets to make a judgement based on Clinton's appreciable output of information and analysis. On Sanders' site - even on this, his cornerstone concern - content is limited to the aforementioned brief, fairly canned, requisite policy summary on an "Issues" page.

At least their disagreement about whether or not to reinstate Glass-Steagall has made for lively debate. Here’s how that’s gone, paraphrasing minimally:
 
Sanders: The big banks must be broken up! We need Glass-Steagall to prevent another economic disaster!
 
Clinton: Glass-Steagall no longer addresses our post-recession needs. It separated commercial banks from investment banks, but it didn’t provide deterrents to or consequences for exceptional risk-taking by either sector. It will take more than any one piece of legislation to prevent another economic disaster. I propose we introduce risk-fees tied to the size and type of loans and investments made by either sector; and better exploit the provisions in Dodd-Frank to empower regulators to identify which banks threaten to grow “too big to fail”, then force them to downsize, reorganize, or disband. And we need new legislation that provides for oversight of financial industries like insurance, mortgage lending, and hedge fund management, which - with the backing of big-bank funding - actually created the recession.
 
Sanders: The big banks must be broken up! We need Glass-Steagall to prevent another economic disaster!
 
To be fair, when pressed, Sanders has mentioned some of the same ideas Clinton has proposed, but he hasn’t challenged her stance on Glass-Steagall besides saying he’s in disagreement. If he has a plan to address the questions Clinton raises, a more progressive and hard-hitting alternative, he might oughta produce it before June.
 
Sanders’ credibility as Top Minimum-Wage Champion is also in question. Both candidates have lauded the work of the Fight for 15 advocacy group, and supported efforts on state and local levels to raise their own minimums to $15 an hour. But on the federal level, Sanders' ostensibly hyper-progressive demand for a $15 minimum is deceptive.

Last year Secretary Clinton joined with President Obama in throwing support behind the most coordinated and widely-supported Congressional effort to push through a raise on the minimum wage in years. In April of 2015, 303 US Senators and Representatives came together and signed on to new legislation that proposes a raise for a federal minimum wage that the GOP has kept locked-in at $7.25 since 2007. This high-profile, popular bill provides for an increase to $12 per hour by 2020. Hard to say whether Republicans in Congress will budge, but the hope (and strategy) is that this groundswell of unified Executive, Congressional Democratic, and advocacy group support will finally overcome some opposition. You'll be hearing a lot more about this bill as it moves forward, so keep an eye out. It's called the Raise the Wage Act of 2015. 
 
But wait, guess what, more to the story. Less than three months from the introduction of said Raise the Wage Act, Senator Bernie Sanders, apparently finding the dogged work of 303 of his colleagues and the support of the POTUS pale proof of concern for beleaguered workers introduces a competing (with his fellows) bill, the Pay Workers a Living Wage Act of 2015, which proposes to raise the wage to $15 by 2020, rather than $12 by 2020. He's tired of pussyfootin' around it seems, these people need $15 by 2020, and I can make that happen! His secret weapon – the thing that will propel his bill past the widely-supported, endorsed by the president one, and right on through Congress?

Well, he doesn’t say. Presumably the thinking is this: contrary to the collective judgement of hundreds of Democratic Senators and Representatives, including the most experienced and successful veterans of Congress, the only useful tool in the negotiating toolbox that will break through and make headway - on this issue, at this juncture - is the use of a Sanders for President truism, “If you start by asking for a full loaf of bread, at worst you’re gonna get a half loaf. [? At worst, you get nothing.] If you start by asking for a half loaf, you’re going to get crumbs. [Or you could half, depending.]”

This strategy doesn’t signal that Bernie is more progressive than Hillary, or that he cares more about American workers. It's no sign that he understands better than Hillary the egregiously insufficient level of income provided by $12 an hour: she has been at pains to iterate that even $15 would not be a living wage. Sander's decision to go out on a limb by taking a "let's overbid and bargain down from there" approach is also not evidence that he has the chops and experience (and connections, there's the rub!) to get a wage raise pushed through. On the contrary, unfortunately. Slapping down a counterproposal to his own team's proposal robs him of the connections, wide-support, co-signers and votes he needs to make anything happen. Doesn't that signal a President Sanders would be less collaborative than a President Hillary, that he'd operate in the realm of theatrics rather than the realm of results, actually impeding progress towards a living wage? 
 
These are just a couple of examples of the story behind the Sanders campaign's underlying premise that a President Sanders would conceive and execute reforms far more advanced than those of a President Clinton, leaping over her proposed baby steps to swiftly overhaul our system of government. 

The premise is false.
 
Now, why again is all this so important? How can erroneous claims made by a primary candidate who is no longer numerically competitive do harm? Senator Sanders’ ongoing proclamations that he provides a bold, viable alternative to Secretary Clinton’s purposeful, measurable objectives are fodder for deep disenchantment by a whole contingent of voters on the left. They are a perfect fuel for the type of energy spent by true believers decrying and dismissing all practical efforts, even the good fight waged over hostile turf. They help grow the evergreen far-left inclination to malign liberal politicians who govern, passionately, as facilitators, collaborators and diplomats, rather than as activists, agitators and zealots. These claims delay again the learning of lessons from our collective experience shifting from the heady exhilaration of the 2008 campaign to the realities of executive branch administration in a time of extraordinary Congressional opposition. They certainly beg the question of just how a Sanders supporter would view the sort of adjustments and concessions a President Sanders would have to make in order to function in the Oval Office. Just like every president before him. Just like the next Great Left Hope.  
 
Of course the follow-up premise to the one that says Bernie Sanders is a revolutionary, is the one that says Hillary Clinton is a bureaucrat who embraces a style seen by some as - at best - grounded, pragmatic, and content with small gains, and at worst, cautious, complacent, and reflective of a watered-down social vision.

But a thoughtful review of the Clinton point-of-view on our country's future reflects absolutely no lack of conviction, failure of imagination, or fear of conflict! Read her editorials and thought pieces; listen, not just to her stump speeches but the quieter, in-depth remarks; rewatch her interviews and debate performances. And really tune in to the writings, policy remarks, and debates to come. Know who this woman really is, the person you may end up glad to support in her hopeful journey to the Oval Office. Decide for yourself, obviously, but there may well be some pleasant surprises there. There may be evidence that it makes sense to challenge previous conceptions about the motivations and intentions of Secretary Clinton.

In a way, in the context of our current political climate, incrementalism might be said to require more conviction and passion than would a revolution. Incrementalism requires a coupling of such moral ambition with the level discipline and patience necessary to bear through periods of heavy opposition, suspended action, and fallen-through deals; and remain on a path towards progress.

​The ultimate premise, that Clinton - intentionally or obtusely - has opted for a harder road and gradual progress; while Sanders has the clarity and fervor it takes to strike out on a more defiant yet somehow equally viable path - that is the least supportable proposition of all.