(First appeared in CQ Magazine on May 16, 2016.)

It looks increasingly likely that voters this November will have a clear choice. In Donald Trump, they’d have a true Washington outsider seeking to upend the way of doing business in the capital. In Hillary Clinton, a creature of Washington, they’d have a politician with a lengthy government resume and an argument that her experience would enable her to grease the wheels of government after years of gridlock.

Clinton will say — indeed she is already saying — that she is best equipped to repair the breach that widened between the legislative and executive branches during the Obama years. Her comments during an Iowa campaign stop earlier this year are typical: “When I was in the Senate, of course I had to work with Republicans. I think every piece of legislation, just about, that I ever introduced had a Republican co-sponsor.”

The statement was false, but there was a grain of truth in it. Clinton, who served as New York’s junior senator from 2001 to 2009, worked across the aisle on noncontroversial issues and sought to convince her colleagues to take small, left-leaning steps. Her incremental approach won over many Republican skeptics and she compiled a modest record of accomplishment.

If she takes the same approach as president, it won’t be the revolution promised by Trump or by her Democratic primary opponent Bernie Sanders, the independent Vermont senator. But prominent Republicans and Democrats believe it could help restore a working relationship between the White House and Capitol Hill that has been in tatters since President Barack Obama pushed through his health care law over the opposition of every Republican in Congress in 2010.