In the Race for the Democratic Leadership, It’s All about Know-How

In the American primaries that began in Iowa on Monday, the battle between Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders is set to get interesting. Contrary to what each one states, the differences between their policies are certainly important but not irreconcilable. Sanders embodies idealism and a break with tradition, while Clinton represents realism and continuity. However, both advocate for paid maternity leave, an increase in the minimum wage, student loan reforms, a huge reform of Wall Street, and an increase in taxes for the wealthiest people. Will the former secretary of state’s pragmatism end up being swept away by the Vermont senator’s more aggressive promises? In any case, as Clinton has reiterated on a number of occasions while reiterating her attachment to the left, “I’m a progressive, but I’m a progressive that likes to get things done.”

As we often forget on our side of the Atlantic, in order to “get things done,” you need to reach compromises with Congress. As Obama found out, to his own cost (regarding the impossibility of closing the Guantánamo Bay prison, or the trench war to impose his health insurance reforms), a president must know how to reconcile the House of Representatives and the Senate. While the mother of all battles will be fought on Nov. 8, half of the senators and all of the representatives will continue on in their posts. It is very unlikely that the chambers will drop their ultraconservative foothold. A future Democratic U.S. president, whether male or female, would experience a difficult cohabitation and would have to get personally involved in every struggle, every paper and every nomination. He or she will win a few of these exhausting tugs of war and lose others, all the while building circumstantial majorities with variable geometry, breaking some promises in order to solidify a majority elsewhere. Sanders’s victories would not be the same as Clinton’s. Rather than the candidates’ personalities, it is safe to say that the method of government that Sanders and Clinton are envisaging and the reforms that the Democratic voters are willing to abandon will play a key role in the campaign.