Eight years after Barack Obama was swept into the White House on a passionate tsunami of "hope" and "change," the Democratic Party is being forced to settle for Hillary Clinton, one of the worst presidential candidates in modern history. She is, at best, running marginally ahead of a 74-year-old socialist (who also promises to enact significant "change") in the race for the 2016 nomination. Her message heading into the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries amounts to: "Realistic, incremental progress on a ruthlessly pragmatic assessment of a status quo characterized by spiritless gridlock in Washington and by the way did you know I’m a grandmother?"
Bernie Sanders is the rightful heir to the Obama dream. Hillary Clinton is the death of that dream. This tweet says it all:
HRC is the most qualified to head the political system we have. Bernie is the most qualified to create the political system we should have.
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) January 25, 2016
Reich, a staunch liberal who served as labor secretary under Bill Clinton yet endorsed Obama in 2008, has captured the sentiment echoed in recent endorsements of Hillary Clinton, by the Clinton campaign, as well as her allies in the liberal establishment: "Sure, Sanders says the right things, but let’s not get carried away. Hoping for change is pointless. It might as well be Hillary."
As Hillary explained in a previous interview with millennial heartthrob Lena Dunham, if people can’t get excited about voting for an aging politician who is only marginally more charismatic than Bill Belichick, they should "be pragmatic and do it anyway."
But Hillary still has to win the nomination. Sanders is leading in New Hampshire and gaining ground in Iowa. The conventional wisdom from the pundit class holds that even if she loses both states she will probably cruise to the nomination anyway. And the pundits are usually right.