Jon Margolis is a political columnist for VTDigger.
The Democrats are getting downright tetchy with one another. Not just the candidates, either. Their supporters are bickering, accusing one another of sneaky tactics, bullying, racism, sexism, ageism, and more.
No wonder. A great deal is riding on which of them wins.
Or maybe not.
Yes, one will have a better chance of beating President Donald Trump in November. But nobody knows which one, no matter how ardently their various champions insist that they do.
But that’s just tactics. What about actually governing the country, proposing bills, signing (or vetoing) legislation, setting domestic and foreign policy? Wouldn’t America be a different place depending on which Democrat got elected president?
In a word: no.
Assume (because it is likely) that if any Democrat wins, his or her party will keep control of the House of Representatives and eke out a small majority in the Senate. In that case, at the end of four or eight years of the presidency of any one of them, life in America and the world will be different than it is now.
But it will not be perceptibly more different if those are years under President Bernie Sanders or President Pete Buttigieg, President Elizabeth Warren or President Amy Klobuchar, President Joe Biden or President Mike Bloomberg.
Under any one of them, after those four or eight years:
· Everybody (or almost everybody) will have health insurance, many still with private companies;
· Law and regulation will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but little of the “Green New Deal” will have been enacted;
· Asylum applicants will be better treated at the Southern border, but that border will not have become “open” by any definition of the word;
· The minimum wage will be higher, but probably not as high as $15-an-hour by 2024;
· The new crop of judges and justices won’t oppose abortions and labor unions, but won’t revolutionize the criminal justice system.
And more along the spectrum of domestic and foreign policy: campaign spending and voting rights, relations with NATO allies and Middle East countries, income inequality and taxes. A check of the websites of the Democratic candidates reveals that there aren’t likely to be huge differences even in what they propose, much less in what they accomplish.
Whichever one of those Democrats wins is only going to be president. Even presidents who think they can get everything they want (possibly the incumbent?) can’t do that.
It isn’t that there are no differences among the Democratic candidates, or that these differences are insignificant. But the policy distance between Trump and all of them together overwhelms whatever disagreements they have with one another.
Even greater is the distance between what they propose as candidates and what they could accomplish as president. “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose,” the late Mario Cuomo noted more than 30 years ago, if anything understating the case. Campaigning is aspirational. Governing is a slog.
At their last debate, they all said they would amend the Constitution to reverse the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling which undermined campaign finance laws.
Lots of luck. Amending the Constitution is hard. It would take years and could be blocked by as few as 14 state legislatures.
The issue on which Democrats have disagreed most forcefully is health care, with Sanders and Warren calling for replacing private health insurance with “Medicare for all,” the others opting instead for expanding the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) by adding a “public option.”
As even Bernie Sanders must know, it’s not certain the House would pass his proposal, and all but certain that the Senate would not.
Among those apparently aware of this reality is New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of Sanders’ most celebrated supporters, who in an interview last week acknowledged that a president “can’t wave a magic wand” to get bills through Congress.
But she insisted Sanders was right to stick to his “Medicare for all” plan. “The worst-case scenario?” she said. “We compromise deeply and we end up getting a public option. Is that a nightmare? I don’t think so.”
Let Democratic tacticians debate the wisdom or lack thereof of that approach. The point is that even the most avid champions of the most ambitious candidates recognize that those ambitions are hopes, not all of which will survive the slog.
That doesn’t mean the hopes are irrelevant, or that voters should not consider them before choosing which candidate to support. No president has fulfilled all his campaign promises, but every recent president has tried to govern the country in the general direction indicated by his campaign.
Presidents have more leeway when it comes to foreign policy, where everything doesn’t have to be approved by Congress. But here, too, the candidates don’t differ all that much. At their last debate they all said they would withdraw troops from the Middle East but perhaps not all of them.
As Barack Obama learned and Donald Trump is learning (or at least is being taught), it’s easy for a candidate to pledge troop withdrawal, hard for a president to withdraw troops. Even in foreign policy, presidents are not free agents. They face pressure from the Pentagon, the State Department, foreign allies, domestic businesses, and the public.
Obviously, U.S. foreign policy would be very different under any of the Democratic contenders than it has been for the last three years or is likely to be if Trump is re-elected. As it is actually applied, though, it would be imperceptibly different under any one of the Democrats compared to the others.
Even the so-called “progressive” (Warren and Sanders) are center-left pragmatists. The others – the “moderates” – are slightly more centrist center-left pragmatists. And as president, none would get to do whatever he or she chose.
