On the subject of who would be more likely to advance an agenda as President - Clinton or Sanders - the following was posted on a local blog by a guy I know:
As for Bernie Sanders vs. Hillary Clinton: You knock Sanders because he is, in your description, an ineffective legislator and unlikely to pass an agenda if he wins the presidency. On the other hand, it is implied, Clinton will be effective.
I remember 2007, when Barack Obama was first coming into view. At public events around the country and in Silver City, Obama was making an appeal that politics had become corrosive and poisonous, and the people of the country needed a new way of talking to one another. Obama promised he could break through the logjam. My attitude towards Obama and towards those who supported him and pushed that line was that they were deluded. "With whom," I thought, "do you think you are dealing? Have you been paying attention to the Republicans?"
To those who think that President Bernie Sanders will be ineffective but President Hillary Clinton will "get things done," I say: "With whom do you think you are dealing? Have you been paying attention to the Republicans?" The reality is that neither President Sanders nor President Clinton will get much -- if anything -- done, at least initially, and maybe for the entire course of their presidencies. That does not mean that it does not matter which one becomes president.
To take just one issue: Neither President Clinton nor President Sanders, faced with a Republican majority in both houses of Congress, is going to get anything through. But President Clinton will call, repeatedly, for an increase in the minimum wage from $7.25/hour to $10.10/hour (which is what Obama is currently calling for -- to no avail). What is persuasive about that call? That it will raise income for a full-time worker from the poverty line for a family of 2 to the poverty line for a family of 3? Clearly, that still leaves children in poverty -- a fact that Clinton will never mention. On the other hand, President Sanders will call -- over and over again -- for a minimum wage of $15.00/hour. He will say, truthfully, that at $15.00, a family of five that now lives at about 50% of the poverty line will be lifted above the poverty line.
Which message, repeated over and over again from the bully pulpit of the White House, is likely to catch on and resonate and perhaps -- just perhaps -- get people to change whom they elect to Congress? The one that calls for us to keep children of working parents in poverty? Or the one that calls for us to lift children out of poverty?
I take it as a given that neither Sanders nor Clinton will get much if anything done in a first term, and maybe not in a second, either. We don't know what changes the atmosphere created by President Sanders might instigate. We do know what changes President Clinton, trying to "get things done," will bring. We have had that experience. We will get welfare reform that cuts the ground out from the unemployed and underemployed in an economy that creates ever more people in those two categories. We will get further proof that "the era of big government is over." (Who said that? Hmm. I wonder.) We will get more trade deals like NAFTA (Clinton's current expedient and soon-to-be-abandoned opposition to the TPP notwithstanding).
Pundits say that there is not much difference between the policy pronouncements of Sanders and Clinton. I'm not sure I agree, but even if I did, is there anyone foolish enough to believe that President Clinton will be saying from the White House lawn what candidate Clinton is saying now while Bernie Sanders has a megaphone? On the other hand, is there anyone who thinks President Sanders will be saying anything other than what he is saying now, no matter who the opposition is?
It is a possibility that we won't ever get what President Sanders will call for. It is a certainty we will never get what President Clinton will not even talk about.
AW
