In making this broad argument, Sanders is implicitly indicting not just Clinton, but President Obama and many Democrats who voted for Dodd-Frank financial reform. Indeed, that’s the essence of Sanders’ whole case: Obama achievements such as the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank, while laudable, still fall woefully short of addressing the scale of our challenges and meeting the ideal of distributive justice that Sanders is championing. This, Sanders says, is because Obama failed to break the power of the oligarchy, both by failing to rally a large enough grassroots movement against it and by continuing to take money from it. On both fronts, Sanders will do otherwise.
And yet, at bottom, Sanders is not quite willing to say why it is that the acceptance of oligarchic money by specific individual Democratic politicians, such as Clinton or Obama, leads them directly to personally embrace policies that are insufficiently ambitious to address the soaring inequality that poses a quasi-extistential threat to the middle class and our political economy.
To be clear, as noted above, Sanders is also specifically criticizing Clinton’s policies, which is fair game, and more broadly, there’s nothing wrong with Sanders indicting the entire Democratic establishment. We should be debating the question of how big money paralyzes our system and skews Congressional policy-making in both parties towards the interests of the wealthy. But there are still fundamental unanswered questions at the heart of this Clinton-Sanders argument, and both candidates should fill this void. Clinton could do so by explaining why it is that accepting Wall Street moneydoes not constrain her in policy terms.