Can Bernie "do anything"?
(Apologies if this has come up here before, as I have only been "sliming it" in GDP lately.)
My feeling is that the various disappointments and apparent concessions make it far too easy to forget how far we've come under Pres Obama. It's really not long ago at all that the knuckle draggers were winning big on a platform of God, guns, and gays.
Now we -almost- have equal marriage. Still not where it needs to be, of course, but at least the chickenshit "civil unions" is no longer on the table. And the need for the 1950's perfect church-going wasp family with 2.7 kids seems to be evaporating. Guns won't be going away any time soon. And there will be other social issues (abortion) kept available just for them to stick into the wheel spokes for some time.
I say it's a lot of progress. Does it mean we should be happy to settle for "more of the same"?
No.
I'm always trying to point out, life is not linear. You can have a David Bowie or Alan Rickman, who seem ready to give us another 50 years of their talents. Suddenly they're gone in a flash. Or you can have a Keith Richards, or for that matter, Dick Cheney, who seem to be hanging from a thread, yet keep going and going and going.
Music groups like the Beatles (really, most bands for that matter) can be nobodys for years, then suddenly shoot through the roof. Or a product like iPhone can suffer huge critical scorn among reviewers, but then be an instant success among consumers.
Our next president could have the exact same amount of positive impact as the current one. That's the idea behind "more of the same". It's quite unlikely though. What's more likely is that they'll have a lot more impact. Or maybe a lot less. It depends what side of the mountain the snowball ends up rolling down.
The point is, nobody can really know. To pretend otherwise is foolish. The best we can do is simply to try our best.