In June, when Politico Magazine convened six Democratic thinkers at The Monocle, the storied Capitol Hill restaurant, the mood in the room was surprisingly upbeat. It was exactly one year after Donald Trump had announced the against-the-odds campaign that by May would see him anointed the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee. Now, the candidate appeared to be flailing, criticized for his latest inflammatory comments about the Orlando shooting and the Mexican origins of a federal judge. For the Democrats, the general election was starting to look more and more winnable.

Then again, it was also just 10 days since Hillary Clinton had finally become the Democrats’ presumptive nominee after an unexpectedly hard-fought primary. Clinton’s insurgent challenger, the septuagenarian socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, not only held on much longer than anticipated (and was still hanging on at that point in June, if in name only), but also went to war with the Democratic Party itself, declaring its leadership in the tank for his “establishment” opponent. That leadership—along with President Barack Obama—has been accused of letting the party languish at the state and local level, where Republicans are ascendant. Meanwhile, both the Sanders and Trump campaigns exposed severe weaknesses in the Democrats’ ability to appeal to white working-class voters, the same ones who in past elections were key supporters of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Where does the Democratic Party go from here, and what will it look like years from now? Can it win back the white working class? Should the party even try to—or is it better off embracing diversity in a country on its way to being majority-minority? These are just some of the questions Politico Editor Susan B. Glasser and chief political correspondent Glenn Thrush asked the six smart thinkers we called together last month— Democratic campaign veterans, writers and one sitting Cabinet member—for a spirited conversation about the future of their party.

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Susan Glasser: Today marks exactly one year since Donald Trump entered the presidential campaign, upending certainly the credibility of all political pundits, but in addition to that, really making this, whatever the outcome, an election year for the record books. My guess is that this election season will have consequences that are no less significant for the future of the Democratic Party than for the Republican Party. So, what do you think about where the Democratic Party is headed in the age of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton?

Michael Kazin: Democrats got very lucky with Trump because—I mean, who knows what would’ve happened with Marco Rubio, but clearly Republicans would’ve been doing much better in the polls right now. But having Trump there makes Democrats think that they haven’t really got a problem, which—I think they still do have a problem. They have since the ’60s, in many ways, which is: They have intellectual, upper middle-class well-educated people, and they have black people and Latinos. And the broad middle is still up for grabs. Democrats have not found a way to win those people over in any kind of convincing way. And Trump has made it easy for Democrats to run against him, but they haven’t yet figured out how to run for themselves.

Neera Tanden: I don’t know, we have won the popular vote in five of the last six elections …

Glenn Thrush: You’ve got a guy here, Mitch Stewart, who was one of the architects of Barack Obama’s elections. Do you agree with that assessment of the broad middle?

Mitch Stewart: No. So if you just look at the numbers, this notion that Democrats have to overperform with whites isn’t backed up by the data. So in 2008, 26 percent of the electorate was non-white. In 2012, 28 percent was nonwhite. In 2016, it will probably be 30 or 31 percent nonwhite. We’re going to be a majority-minority country in 2050. And so that trend isn’t slowing down or plateauing. It’s actually relatively linear, and it’s pretty easy to predict.

Tanden: That issue is actually something that’s driving Trump, but also that Democrats have to figure out a response to, which is: The most salient thing in the Republican primary that separated Trump from other Republicans was a sense that whites were losing out. So I do think the Trump phenomenon is a response to two trends. One is an economy that has not been producing good results for the white working class, and also a country that’s becoming more and more diverse. I think that the idea that we’re going to have—it may only be 30 or 35 percent—truly angry people going forward in the United States is actually going to alter our politics. I think Hillary will win this fall, but it’ll alter our politics for some time.

Anita Dunn: Trump is, to some extent, redefining what we think of as polarization in this country. Where polarization has been seen as ideological, it is now being seen almost as behavioral. (Laughter.) No, seriously, though. Neera talked a little about the angry white voter appearance of “that’s who supports Trump.” I actually think Trump’s support is a little more nuanced than that with some people.

Tanden: They’re men.

Dunn: They are men. But I think that what he is doing is, his campaign has been basically issueless with a few exceptions, immigration and trade—that he’s actually taken polarization much more toward attitudes than toward ideological gridlock. And I think that Neera’s right that because he’s dragging his party so far in one direction along that spectrum, that it creates a new center. And that new center actually is farther along than it has been in the past. When you have an extreme, it creates a new center. And you’ve got an extreme here.

Kazin: What’s the content of it?

Dunn: OK, so here is the deal. Has anybody else been struck at the language that mainstream establishment Republicans have been using since the Orlando shooting to talk about the LGBTQ community and rights and how we have to stand with our brothers and sisters? This is just not something that they have been comfortable talking about. But suddenly with Donald Trump far over here, everybody’s comfortable being in the middle here on that issue, right? And that, to me, has been extraordinary.

Tanden: They’re more in the middle because of him?

Thrush: Because he’s pulled it away from ideology and into attitude.

Dunn: Exactly. So I think that’s interesting. One thing I want to say on the Democratic side, as somebody who’s worked for insurgent presidential candidates in the past, is that the Bernie Sanders coalition was way different from the coalitions of the past for insurgents. College-educated voters, who traditionally have been the backbone of insurgent candidacies, supported Hillary Clinton throughout this. And the fact that age, rather than income, rather than any other kind of metric, was the greatest predictor of who you were going to vote for during the primaries is something I think the Democratic Party has to come to grips with.

Kazin: That’s all-important. I mean, I think, obviously, the idea of most people who voted for Bernie now going for Trump—that was a falsity.

Dunn: Oh, I agree with that totally.

Kazin: However, I do think in the larger context, it’s important to remember that by 3-to-1 Americans think that the country’s going in the wrong direction. Young people who like Bernie—you know, it’s very concrete in many ways: They’re afraid they’re not going to have jobs. I used to think, “Oh, Bernie’s all about altruism” and, “Socialism’s back,” and this kind of thing. No. It’s that they want to have health care they can rely on. They want a guaranteed annual income. They want free college.

Thrush: So one of the most circulated articles in the early days of the campaign was this bit about the troubles of white males and how their life expectancy is plateauing. We have a low unemployment rate, but to what extent is this frustration with the kinds of jobs people are getting, the incomes that are part of those jobs—how is that, as you see the labor market, having an impact on politics right now?

Tom Perez: Let me try to bring together your question, Glenn, and your question, Susan, and a couple other observations. Observation No. 1: Donald Trump reminds me of the Know-Nothing movement. And the Know-Nothing movement failed because hope and optimism and inclusion in this country have always triumphed over fear and isolation and pessimism, and we’ve seen it any number of times. And when you were talking about the challenges with white voters, I mean, you look at Super Tuesday, and put Vermont to the side—Hillary Clinton kicked butt among white voters, including in the coal country of Virginia. That is an overlooked fact.

Tanden: And Ohio.

Perez: And Ohio.

E.J. Dionne: Though not West Virginia.

Perez: No, not West Virginia. We’ll get back to that. That mattered.

And also, as we look forward, I think there are a number of truths that we have to level-set in this election. When Barack Obama took office, we were in the worst mess of our lives. You know the data. We’ve now had 75 consecutive months of private-sector job growth, the longest streak in history. The quality of jobs that have been gained in the last two years has also gotten better because that’s what recoveries do. The low-wage jobs tend to come back first.

Having said that, I was born at night. I was not born last night. And I make house calls in this job. And I see America at its best, and I see America at its worst. I’ve been to a lot of places in Ohio and West Virginia where you have chronic pessimism because of a sense that “I haven’t gotten a raise in years” and a real fear that “my kids’ generation is going to be worse off than ours.”

And what frustrates me as much as anything about the politics of the last eight years, is—I give credit to Mitch McConnell, because he was transparent. He said, “My goal is to make Barack Obama a one-term president.” And when I think about the road ahead, and I think about infrastructure; I think about investment and higher ed affordability; I think about paid leave; I think about child care. These are things that we can get done in the United States. Paid leave is a great example, and it gets to your question about labor force participation. Republicans criticize us all the time for the decline in labor force participation. Fifty percent of it is demographics. So unless we summon Ponce de León, you know, we’re going to have challenges with that. The No. 1 thing, Glenn, that we could do to increase labor force participation in this country, the No. 1 policy initiative by far, is to pass federal paid leave.

As a result of the fact that Hillary Clinton articulates a positive vision—she’s talking about the things that keep people up at night, wages and getting me the skills to compete and helping me out with higher ed affordability and the opioid crisis—that’s what’s going to bring people to the polls, as well as the fact that Trump is peddling a message of fear.

Thrush: Wait a second. Hold on. Whoa, whoa, whoa. You had 38,000 jobs created last month, which is a significant deceleration. We’ve seen a downward revision in the previous two months. We may be overdue just cyclically for a recession. It seems to me that one of the biggest threats of the rosy scenario for Democrats about Donald Trump having a 70 percent disapproval rating is the economy, right?

Tanden: So just on the economy, I would say that how the economy feels to real people does not track even a few months of the labor numbers. So, you know, I don’t actually stay up at night.

The thing I would say that’s interesting about the kind of moment we’re in, which is a challenge to the Democratic Party, and it is in part a response to Tom’s comments, is: I don’t actually think the Sanders voters were voting for Sanders to say, “I need this higher ed proposal or I need this.” I actually think part of what they were voting for is a clarity of the analysis of the problem, in part because they are cynical about the solutions anybody has.

Kazin: It could be both.

Tanden: But I think both parties in 2016 are responding in their own ways to the level of congressional dysfunction we have. I mean, obviously, Republican voters went with the most anti-establishment person they could go with in response. The No. 1 feature of their primaries was how much they hated their own leaders due to the level of betrayal.

But I also think Democrats—a lot of Democrats, not everybody, but particularly young voters—weren’t voting transactionally for Bernie Sanders. I think a lot of them worry that Hillary wasn’t going to get this done and Bernie Sanders wasn’t going to get this done, so I’m going to go with the person who says, “Health care is a right.” If we looked at the polling, it isn’t like people thought single payer is going to happen with Bernie Sanders. They think nothing’s going to happen with anybody.

Now, having said that, Hillary, I think, was able to win the actual primary process because she responded aggressively on economics, but also responded more aggressively than Bernie Sanders on the dignity issues, in the sense of loss that people of color have, as well. I think the pivot point for her in the primary was—this is my own view—was her saying in the New York debate, “I agree with Senator Sanders that Wall Street has too much power; we agree on that. But I also think that we have systemic racism in America.” And it was that moment where she said, “These are two parts of the coalition, and I am responding to both of your concerns.”

Perez: It’s not either/or.

Tanden: It’s not one or the other. And truly, Bernie Sanders always was resistant to the latter, or was not comfortable or whatever the right word is. And that is the Democratic Party today. It is economic concerns, and it is also the dignity concerns of a diverse electorate.

Dionne: There’s a whole question about where does the white working class fit into this coalition, and I think there are two questions there. Question one is: Can Democrats win without them? People use a lot of demographics to show that because of the changing demography, economic issues are less important to the electorate. That’s true, up to a point, until you get to Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Wisconsin. And I think, given the importance of those states, to walk away from the white working class for electoral reasons is really problematic.

Stewart: But no one’s suggesting walking away. I just think we as Democrats have an overstated fear of losing a group of voters that we haven’t had for 30 or 40 years.

Dionne: No, no, no, but first of all, Obama needed in those states somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of their votes to carry Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania. That’s still important.

But putting that aside, there is a moral question about the party of Franklin Roosevelt walking away. And I think one of the ironies is that when you look at the impact of globalization, technological change, decline of well-paying blue-collar work, declining unionization—that has hurt two kinds of people who are at each other’s throats sometimes in our policies. One are white working-class people, particularly men. But the other are people in the inner city where—as William J. Wilson wrote in his great bookWhen Work Disappears—if you look at the problems in the city, they are aggravated. Look at Baltimore. The loss of all kinds of blue-collar work has been a real problem.

Tanden: No, no, no. The question for progressives is not whether you can appeal to the white working class on economic issues. We should absolutely try. And if Senator Sanders pushes us in that direction, that is to the good. The question that Donald Trump raises with these voters is: Are they voting for him on economic reasons or are they voting for him because they’re nativists? When the No. 1 issue for people is—that separates his voters from other people in the primary—is that whites are losing out, it’s hard for progressives to respond to that.

Glasser: We’re all talking, at a high volume, around a very important question for this conversation, which is race and the Democratic Party. The racial polarization that we have seen through eight years of the Obama presidency—a lot of people believe that this is a backlash election. There’s a real dispute about how much the white working-class vote has existed for the Democrats in recent years, that Reagan Democrats haven’t been Democrats since Reagan—there’s that argument here.

Dionne: Actual Reagan Democrats have gone to their eternal reward, for the most part.

Glasser: Well, exactly. I want to know: Is the Democratic Party of 2016 and of the future a party of minorities, of diversity? Is the country separating even more by race as a result of what’s happening in this election? And what does that mean? Is that a party that you all are comfortable with that as its identity? That’s really what we’re talking about.

Kazin: I think we’re forgetting immigration when we talk about race. It seems to me that is what the Tea Party turned out to really care about. That’s what, obviously, Trump’s popularity is fueled by a lot. And it’s not just race. As you know, the time the Democrats were the strongest is when basically there was no immigration coming into this country. It’s when immigration was cut off, from the ’30s to the ’60s. Jeff Cowie’s book The Great Exception makes that point very strongly.

Dionne: We were 5 percent foreign-born in 1970, and we’re, like, 13 now.

Perez: The short answer to your question about racial polarization, in my judgment, is absolutely not. I had the good fortune of traveling with President Clinton a few weekends ago in California and I was—

Glasser: That’s President Bill Clinton.

Perez: Yes, President Bill Clinton.

Kazin: The other one’s not president yet.

Perez: And we had a long conversation about the time he spent in Kentucky and the time Hillary Clinton spent in West Virginia. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out where that primary was going to go in West Virginia. [Sanders won, 51 to 36 percent.] She was there for a reason. She was there to make a very strong statement that the Hillary Clinton coalition is a coalition of every race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity in this country. And one of the things that I’ve certainly been doing a lot of and she’s been doing a lot of is talking about issues in places like Ohio and elsewhere that affect white working voters, lifting up apprenticeship, talking about how you build the 21st-century manufacturing environment. When I was a kid growing up in Buffalo, New York, I had a lot of friends whose parents were in the trades, and because we have devalued the trades in this country, they’ve lost stature. And what President Obama has been doing, and she is building on, is issues that speak directly to white working men and women and working men and women of all colors, because apprenticeship isn’t just a white issue.

Thrush: She did very well in the ’08 primaries in places like Kentucky and West Virginia.

Dunn: But why did it work in ’08 and not in ’16?

Thrush: Well, that’s an interesting question.

Dunn: Who was she running against?

Dionne: There are several counties that voted for Hillary over Obama in a place like West Virginia that voted for Bernie over Hillary.

Dunn: The white voter issue is really important from a governing perspective. As long as we have overparticipation in midterm elections of white voters and older voters compared with the presidential electorate, we’re guaranteed under current voting patterns to have congressional gridlock, because we have very different voters participating in these two elections. So from a governing perspective, it’s critical for the Democratic Party, I believe, to figure out either how do we motivate people in midterms, or how do we actually broaden our coalition?

The final thing I want to say on the racial issue is that the assumption that somehow all of the groups that we’re looking at right now will behave the same way for the next 30 years is just crazy. OK? And it’s not healthy for this democracy for one political party to get 94 or 95 percent of the vote of any group. Right? It’s just not. And I think there are a lot of Republicans who understand that. George W. Bush understood that. Ed Gillespie understands it. There’s people over there who understand that. Their system coughed up a candidate who is uniquely horrible on these issues, and they’ll pay the price in this election. But I think that, as we do a look forward, the Democratic Party has its demographic challenge, and that saying, “Well, we’re going to be a presidential-level party, and every 20 years we’re going to get redistricting to break in our favor” is actually not an answer to the governing problem. At the end of the day, whoever our next president is has to govern.

Glasser: What do you think, Mitch, on the race question and how much that matters?

Stewart: Well, I think one point of pride that we have as members of the Democratic Party is that, you know, we feel that it reflects the country. And I think we do a good job, not a great job, of celebrating the diversity of our party membership. And frankly, you’re right, demographics are not destiny, and I don’t want to project that.

Dunn: They’re short-term destiny.

Stewart: Hopefully. But I’m in plenty of Democratic meetings, and there’s tons of white dudes still in those meetings. So the takeover is not imminent. But the big thing that I’m frustrated with is that I feel like our message to white working-class voters is the same message that we’ve had for the last 30 years, and it hasn’t worked. We keep losing them. And so, do we keep saying similar things or repeating things that we know are in their economic interest but frankly haven’t translated into support? The nature of work is shifting. It’s changing dramatically. And I’d love for us to be the party that spearheads—you know, how do we set up a framework so that it does still respect a lot of the things that we want our workers to have, but also recognizes that there’s huge change coming and either we can accept it or we sort of get run over by it.

Dionne: One of the most interesting speeches on this subject in the last month was Elizabeth Warren talking about the gig economy. And I think you’re right that there is this need for progressives everywhere, not just the U.S., to figure out: How do people have rights in an economy when they are completely atomized and where they are in line to work or get their work in ways that push against traditional forms of unionization? Where does power come from for those folks in those situations? And there are things you can do about that.

Perez: I spend a lot of time in this conversation. There’s a lot of ideas out there, but we have to be very careful about ready-fire-aim. And I agree with what you said, Mitch. We have to deliver a message that will resonate with working-class voters. And the key for me is, we should embrace innovation.

I mean part of the challenge and part of the allure of Donald Trump is people who say, “I just want my world to be like it was 30 years ago.” When I was on the Montgomery County Council back in the day, one of the most frequent things I heard from people when we were talking about master plans and land use was, “I just want the Montgomery County of my youth,” to which I would say, “It was segregated. So that was great for you, but is it great for everyone?” So we need to embrace innovation. We need to embrace change. But we need to make sure that innovation is inclusive innovation that doesn’t leave people behind.

Thrush: Mitch was talking about not having the right way to talk to people. In my experience, when you go out and you talk to voters, a lot of this has to do with culture. That may be a sweet package to tie up the racial issue in, but a lot of white working-class voters think Democrats talk down to them.

Tanden: But can we just be honest about this? How do you separate “Democrats talk down to me” and “Democrats are kowtowing to blacks and Latinos”? I think the challenge we have, Mitch, on economic issues is we talk about economic issues because it’s really hard to talk about other issues. And honestly, I don’t know how, as a progressive, to do that because people are feeling a loss of perhaps social status because the country is diversifying. And as a progressive, I want everyone to be equal at the table.

But I do think we have to be mindful of the differences between different groups. So white millennials are more open to diversity than any other group of whites. And I think if you actually look at the Democrats’ coalition, it is a coalition that is diverse. It represents people like me. It represents whites. It’s represents people of color. But I think we have to be honest that there are reactions on multiple levels here. People are reacting to changing economics, but also changing demographics. And it’s easier for progressives to respond to one of those and harder on the other. And having said that, I do not think we will ever have a Democratic nominee who does not win people of color within the Democratic primary. It’s just not going to happen in the future.

Dionne: When you look at Barack Obama’s two elections, we tend to look at the fact that he got 39, 40 percent of the white vote, overwhelming victories among African-Americans and Latinos. If you flip it around and ask what percentage of Barack Obama’s vote came from white people, a substantial majority of Barack Obama’s vote came from white Americans in both elections. In fact, he carried whites in the Northeast, he split them in the Midwest and the West and then he got clobbered, he got beaten badly in the South. So if you look at one set of numbers, you say, “Boy, are we racially polarized.” If you look at the other set of numbers, you say, “Wait a minute. It’s actually quite a lot more complicated than that.”

Kazin: I think we’re expecting the Democratic Party to do things the Democratic Party cannot do on its own. The Democratic Party, when it succeeds and is a governing party, is a coalition. And it’s pushed by social movements; it’s pushed by ethnic and racial groups. You saw it with gay marriage. That was not a Democratic Party platform, to be in favor of gay marriage in 2004. Arguably, it defeated John Kerry because if he won Ohio, as we know, he would’ve won, even though he might not be president either if it came from outside of the party. And that was true in the ’30s and ’40s and ’50s, too. The black freedom movement was not a Democratic movement, to start with. It was outside the party.

Democrats need movements, need extraparty institutions to push the party. And that’s why—even though I didn’t vote for Bernie; in D.C. it didn’t matter anyway—I think he was really valuable because he really embodied the sense of “let’s push the party to places where, right now, it isn’t.”

Glasser: I’m glad you brought it back to the question of the party—which part is the party and which part is the overall political environment we’re operating in—because I want to ask each of you: President Obama hasn’t really been that much identified as a traditional party man. What shape is he leaving the actual Democratic Party in? And more broadly, both parties, it seems to me, in 2016 have been under assault. Do these institutions really work, or are they basically being disrupted, along with us in the media and everybody else? I mean, this institution has really been under considerable assault. By all rights, Hillary Clinton, let’s be honest, she should’ve clobbered Bernie Sanders.

Dionne: The institutional thing is not unique to us. I think that if you look at social democratic or moderate-left parties all over the world, they are facing crises. Podemos in Spain; the Social Democrats in Germany have splintered. And the most striking thing about the Trump campaign is that it’s the importation of the European far right into American politics. So I think that over the next 10 years, if Hillary Clinton wins, she is going to face some of the same challenges that social democratic parties in Europe face. And Trump helps Democrats, we think, win this election. But governing successfully is still a challenge for a social democratic center-left kind of party.

So I do think there is a challenge to the political party, period, as a form, and that political parties don’t play all of the same functions that they used to play. We could romanticize the party clubhouse in all of this, but there was actually a lot of social life organized around things like the church, the union, the political party and in a lot of our communities. And among particularly the younger generation, there is weakening identity—unions have been clobbered, we know—but there’s also weakening identity with religious institutions and parties. This is not unique to the United States.

The challenge is that no one has figured out a better way to organize small-d democratic government than through political parties. Now, what I found fascinating about what Obama did—when you think about what he did online, his online organizing, particularly in ’08, was replacing the functions of the traditional party, and we talked a lot about the high-tech end of it. But a lot of those emails ended in a meeting in somebody’s living room or a door knock in some neighborhood to pull a voter out. And so I think people on both sides are trying to figure out ways to reinvent the party so it feels less antique and irrelevant.

Thrush: Well, this is one of the people who did that. What do you think, Mitch?

Stewart: Has anyone gone to a local county Democratic Party meeting lately? It’s like going into a retirement center.

Tanden: If you look at every institution in America right now, they are under assault. Right? The Republican Party. Sure, the Democratic Party. Big Business does not move voters like it used to. Obviously, I don’t need to talk about the media. I mean, this is an environment where actually I think it was support for the president, support for the traditions in the party, which actually helped Hillary survive a kind of anti-establishment wave in the country. It’s not like the party infrastructure did.

The gigantic difference between Democrats and Republicans in this electorate was about 60 percent of Republicans were saying they felt betrayed by the leadership of their party, and it was about 20 percent of Democrats who said the same thing, which is a function of the fact that there is still strong support for the president within the party. And, you know, it’s very hard when you’re the out party. You don’t have a national leader to come under and to pull yourselves together. I think the stabilizing force of the president and his popularity within the party has actually sewn a lot of things together that could’ve had a centrifugal force, pulling them apart. I’m not saying everyone, like, loves the party infrastructure. I think that’s the wrong way to think about it, but they are not in the same level of anger.

Perez: You know, I’m a proud Buffalo-minican, OK? A proud Dominican-American born in Buffalo. After my dad died when I was a kid, my surrogate father was a teamster. I bring all this up in a nutshell to simply illustrate that people who I grew up around—what we have to communicate to them is, success is not zero-sum politics. It’s not the “I can help you as long as I take a little from you.” That is the message of Donald Trump.

The message of Hillary Clinton, and the message more generally of Democrats, is that success is not going to be zero-sum politics. And the reason why I think Neera is correct about this is, you’ve got the overwhelming majority of Republicans saying, “Throw the bums out.” And now you have a phenomenon—I keep thinking about 2000, when Al Gore was showing the arm to President Clinton—and now we have President Obama, who is, I think, a really important asset in the general election campaign.

Thrush: Has there ever in recent history been a sitting president who’s been as important an asset to a candidate as Obama is to Clinton? Can you think of anything historic?

Dionne, Dunn: Reagan.

Glasser: You know, I wanted to ask you about ’88. I’ve been feeling that ’88 is a really interesting analogy for this year—that Hillary Clinton, in some ways, is both Bush and Dukakis, right?

Dionne: I think ’88 is exactly the right analogy because Reagan understood that Bush’s election was very important to his creating a legacy. And I think it’s 100 percent clear that Obama understands that Clinton’s election is very important to his legacy, and that Bush in ’88 was allowed, in a way, to create some distance from Reagan where it helped him. So, he ran as the education president and the environmental president without looking like he was being disloyal. And so I think that where Clinton is going to need room, Obama will give her room.

Susan Glasser is editor of Politico.

Glenn Thrush is Politico’s chief political correspondent.