The Obama-Sanders Divide

WASHINGTON -- In the fevered atmosphere of an election for president, attention naturally drifts away from the one who's still there. So it is with President Obama. The day after the New Hampshire primary, Obama returned to the scene of his political education -- and the launching pad for his own campaign nine sobering years ago.

In Springfield, Illinois, Obama lamented the "poisonous political climate" and mourned that "the tone of our politics hasn't gotten better since I was inaugurated; in fact, it has gotten worse."

His message, mostly, got buried -- bumped off the front pages and evening news by the aftershocks of New Hampshire. Some of the coverage correctly understood the president as criticizing Donald Trump, as when he denounced politics that "reward the most extreme voices or the most divisive language or who is best at launching schoolyard taunts."

But the more interesting aspect of Obama's speech was its implicit disagreement with Bernie Sanders, the previous day's winner. Decorum dictates that an incumbent stay above the current political fray, yet Obama's speech can be interpreted as a rebuttal to Sanders, a rebuke of the Vermont senator's unyielding approach to politics and an unstated endorsement of Hillary Clinton's more-plodding pragmatism.

Contrast, first, Obama's ingrained tropism toward the middle ground with Sanders' call for political upheaval. Voters, Obama said, "instinctively know that issues are more complicated than rehearsed sound bites." They "understand the difference between realism and idealism." They possess "the maturity to know what can and cannot be compromised, and to admit the possibility that the other side just might have a point."

This analysis is antithetical to Sanders' stark depiction of the political landscape. Like Ronald Reagan, Sanders paints in bold colors, not pale pastels. If the other side has a point, Sanders doesn't see it, or at least doesn't acknowledge it. The business model of Wall Street is fraud. The economy is rigged. The billionaire class has purchased a chokehold on Congress.

Obama's message was that voters should find what unites them, across red and blue America. Sanders' is that they must man the barricades.

Contrast, second, Obama's assessment of why voters are so repulsed by politics with Sanders' grimmer diagnosis. In Obama's analysis, "a poisonous political climate ... pushes people away from participating in our public life. It turns folks off. It discourages them, makes them cynical."

The consequence, Obama said, is that "more powerful and extreme voices fill the void. ... And that's how we end up with only a handful of lobbyists setting the agenda. That's how we end up with policies that are detached from what working families face every day. That's how we end up with the well-connected who publicly demand that government stay out of their business but then whisper in its ear for special treatment."

Sanders sees the situation in expressly monetary terms: "a campaign finance system which is corrupt, which is undermining American democracy, which allows Wall Street and billionaires to pour huge sums of money into the political process to elect the candidates of their choice," as he said in Thursday's PBS debate.

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