2016 Postmortem

portlander23

(2,078 posts) Wed Oct 14, 2015, 12:24 PM Oct 2015

Vox: One sentence that explains how Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton differ

One sentence that explains how Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton differ
Matthew Yglesias
Vox

"In my view, Congress does not regulate Wall Street; Wall Street regulates Congress."

One of the most telling exchanges in the first Democratic presidential debate came hours into the program in the wake of a not-so-well-explained back-and-forth between Martin O'Malley and Hillary Clinton about the 1999 repeal of a 1933 bank regulation. Offering an appealing dose of clarity, Bernie Sanders burst in with his take: "Congress does not regulate Wall Street; Wall Street regulates Congress."

This, more than any narrow dispute about a specific issue, perfectly captures the difference between Sanders and Clinton.

To Clinton, policy problems require policy solutions, and the more nuanced and narrowly tailored the solution, the better. To Sanders, policy problems stem from a fundamental imbalance of political power. The issue with finance isn't so much the presence or the absence of any specific rule; it's that the system is rigged, and the fat cats are running the show. The problem with Clinton (or with Barack Obama or O'Malley or Joe Biden or any other mainstream Democrat) is that she is part of an establishment political system that is fueled by campaign contributions and entrenches a fundamentally corrupt governance model. The solution isn't to pass a smart new law, it's to spark a "political revolution" that upends the balance of power.

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