Hillary Clinton

....the closer you get to the Sandernistas' Brand New Congress initiative — the new project by recently laid-off Bernie staffers to create a revolution in Congress beginning with the 2018 elections — the less it looks like the instrument for a difficult but achievable task and the more it looks like the product of a very strange set of beliefs about American politics. It's not focused on boosting progressive turnout in general elections, but on recruiting and running candidates in Republican as well as Democratic primaries who meet a rigid set of policy litmus tests. The idea is very explicitly that people alive with the Bern can literally elect a "brand-new Congress" in one election cycle to turn public policy 180 degrees. Or so says key organizer Zack Exley:

“We want a supermajority in Congress that is fighting for jobs, criminal justice reform and the environment,” Exley said. “Most Americans actually want that, and I think we get it by running Dems in blue areas, Republicans in deep red areas, and by running independents wherever we didn’t defeat incumbents.”
Republicans, too?

Corbin Trent, another former Sanders staffer, said bringing Republicans on board is “the key to it being a successful idea” and there’s enough overlap between Sanders’ platform and tea party conservatives to make the PAC’s goals feasible.
Reality television star Donald Trump’s current status as the Republican front-runner demonstrates that GOP voters are eager for candidates who, like Trump, criticize the corrupting influence of money in politics and the impact of free trade deals on American workers, Trent said.
“This will allow Republicans to say ‘Yeah, I’m a Republican, but I believe climate change is real and I don’t believe all Muslims are terrorists,” he said. “It will allow people to think differently in the Republican Party if they want to pull away from the hate-based ideology.”
Yes, that was what I feared: The discredited notion that lefties and the tea party can make common cause in something other than hating on the Clintons and Barack Obama is back with a vengeance. And worse yet, Donald Trump — Donald Trump — is being touted as an example of a Republican capable of progressive impulses because he shares the old right-wing mercantilist hostility to free trade and has enough money to scorn lobbyists. Does your average Trump supporter really "believe climate change is real" and disbelieve that "all Muslims are terrorists"? Do Obamacare-hating tea-partiers secretly favor single-payer health care? Do the people in tricorn hats who favor elimination of labor unions deep down want a national $15-an-hour minimum wage? And do the very activists who brought the Citizens United case and think it's central to the preservation of the First Amendment actually want to overturn it?

Sanders advocates argue that if he wins it will be because he has remade U.S. politics and brought about the revolution that even he acknowledges is necessary to enact any of his agenda. (And pause for a moment and ponder the wisdom of supporting a candidate whose path to victory requires a full-on political revolution.) But what would a Sanders Senate look like?

Look at it this way: There are 22 states that Obama lost in both 2008 and 2012 – years in which he became the first president in a half-century to win at least 51 percent of the vote in consecutive elections. It seems fair to characterize those as solid red states. That's 44 senators from red states; not to say that Democrats can't win some of those seats. But it does mean that the Democrats who are elected in those states will be in the Joe Manchin, Claire McCaskill, Heidi Heitkamp mold. They won't be bearing the single-payer standard any time soon and it's not because they're favoring their corporate patrons over their constituents – it's because they're listening to their constituents.

The most galling thing is that, as Michael Cohen pointed out in The Boston Globe this week, Sanders understands the realities of accommodating local politics: He cast votes favorable to the gun industry because of Vermont's gun culture. But in other cases he refuses to acknowledge such accommodations for other legislators. "It's as if in Sanders' mind, parochialism, ideology, or politics plays no role ... in politics."

The fact of the matter is that ideologically we're a diverse and often incoherent country. That doesn't mean you can't accomplish something substantial – Obamacare is, as a wise man once said, a big flipping deal. But it does mean that you need a politician who is able to acknowledge the limitations of the system in order to figure out what is achievable.