Ezra Klein drills down deep into the differences in the 'vision' of the candidates:
...the Audacity of Political Realism...
http://www.vox.com/2016/1/28/10858464/hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-political-realism
"snip.....
The problem for Clinton is that the immediate future looks grim for the progressive agenda, and she knows it. Republicans are likely to hold both the House and the Senate. They have a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court and, at least for the moment, huge majorities in governorships and state legislatures. Americans are, if anything, growing more divided. Money is an ever more powerful force in American politics. The fact that voters don't want a fight doesn't mean they're not going to have one.
Clinton doesn't have an easy answer for any of this, and, perhaps to her credit, she's refused to pretend otherwise. Democrats were bitterly disappointed by the compromises Obama made when he had huge Democratic majorities. The compromises the next Democratic president will have to make, given the likely Republican dominance of Congress, are going to be even more brutal for liberals — and if they're not, it will likely be because nothing of importance gets done in the first place.
The argument for Clinton is that she's best suited to handle this war of partisan attrition — she knows how to work the bureaucracy, defend against a hostile Congress, and find incremental gains where they exist. This is a realistic vision of a Democratic presidency after Obama. It's a vision, as best I can tell, that's shared by Obama. But it's not a vision liberals want to believe in. It's not a vision that Hillary Clinton has figured out how to sell. Perhaps it's not a vision that can be sold.
Bernie Sanders's vision of politics may be less realistic, but it's a vision suffused with hope. And there's never been anything audacious about asking voters to hope.
No one knows this better than Obama himself. "My bet — and I may end up being wrong about this — my bet is that the candidate who can project hope still is the candidate who the American people, over the long term, will gravitate toward."
.....snip"
