Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine.

Now that Bernie Sanders is looking less like a quixotic left-wing protest candidate and more like a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, a contradiction at the heart of his campaign is becoming more glaring. You can call it the Radical’s Dilemma, or the Revolutionary’s Quandary, or maybe just Bernie’s Obama Problem. Whatever you call it, it was on stark display at last night’s debate in New Hampshire, even though Sanders tried to gloss over it.

The conundrum boils down to a schizophrenic view of a nation where progressive change is impossible and where progressive change is simultaneously happening. On one hand, Sanders argues that the political system is hopelessly corrupt, that the economy is outrageously rigged, that nothing good can happen as long as Wall Street, drug companies and fossil-fuel interests own Washington. On the other hand, Sanders says President Barack Obama has done a “fantastic job,” that America is in “much better shape than we were seven years ago,” that there has been significant progress on financial reform, health reform and climate action.


This is not just a political problem, as Sanders tries to carve out space to Obama’s left without denouncing a president with a 90 percent approval rating among Democrats. And Sanders can’t wave away the problem by saying the progress under Obama has been impressive, considering the Republican opposition, but insufficient; Obama says the same thing. This is a philosophical problem for a radical candidate, a question he hasn’t figured out how to answer: If things are never going to get better without a political revolution to take power back from special interests, how is it that things are getting better?

Hillary Clinton has some contradictory positions as well, and they also were on display last night. She struggled to explain her lucrative speeches for Wall Street audiences, at one point arguing that financial executives were funding ads against her because they make “smart investments,” which seemed to beg the question of why they had invested so lavishly in her. She had even more trouble explaining her various flip-flops on free-trade agreements, declaring that “I have a very clear view about this,” then proceeding to lay out a very unclear view of why she opposed Obama's Pacific Rim deal. The Republican debates also have been chock-full of contradiction—bitter complaints about the national debt coupled with calls for massive tax cuts, pledges to repeal Obamacare followed by word salad about Americans who would lose their insurance, and so on.

But the Sanders message has largely avoided scrutiny, perhaps because the notion of a rumpled 74-year-old socialist president with a Brooklyn accent from the People’s Republic of Vermont seemed (and, let’s face it, still does seem) rather inconceivable. Really, though, his message would have made more sense in the 2008 Democratic primary, when the economy was falling apart and 200,000 Americans were fighting abroad under a Republican president. In 2016, with unemployment now below 5 percent and the vast majority of the troops back home, it’s much more of a mixed message.

One telling example came on a question about his foreign policy doctrine. After contrasting his opposition to the war in Iraq to Clinton’s vote for war, Sanders drew his larger conclusion: “The key doctrine of the Sanders administration would be: No, we cannot continue to do it alone; we need to work in coalition.” But that is basically the doctrine of the Obama administration. And when Sanders discussed specifics of ISIL, Iran, North Korea, China and Cuba, he basically endorsed the diplomacy-first, don’t-do-stupid-stuff Obama approach. He even tried to relitigate a fight from the 2008 primary, bringing up Clinton’s critique of Obama’s willingness to deal with dictators. “I think President Obama had the right idea,” Sanders said.

On many domestic issues, Sanders hugged the president almost as hard. He noted that the economy was shedding 800,000 jobs a month when Obama took office, that “we are in much better shape than we were seven years ago, although my Republican colleagues seem to have forgotten where we were seven years ago.” When Clinton accused him of writing Obama out of the progressive movement, he said he does consider the president a progressive who has done “an excellent job.” When Clinton suggested Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, he said the law has “done a lot of good things,” and even bragged that he helped write it. He vowed to protect the gains of the Obama era while pushing for a single-payer system.

Sanders has tried to square a similar circle on issues like financial reform and climate change. He has praised Obama’s Wall Street reforms, which have ratcheted up regulation of big banks and forced them to hold more loss-absorbing capital, as well as Obama’s Clean Power Plan and other efforts to promote clean energy. He has denounced Republican efforts to gut them. But he also has suggested that much more dramatic reforms are necessary, and that they’ll never happen without dramatic campaign-finance reforms. By contrast, Clinton has vowed to continue Obama’s incremental approach, to build on Obama’s reforms.

Sanders makes sense as the candidate of anti-establishment Democrats who consider Obama a disappointment; he recently campaigned with professor Cornel West, a prominent left-wing Obama basher. Last night, Clinton denied that she is an establishment Democrat because she’s a woman—but that’s just silly; she’s a fixture of the Democratic establishment, Obama’s secretary of state, and she makes ideological sense as an heir to Obama’s policies. The problem for Sanders is that most Democrats who vote in primaries do not consider Obama a huge disappointment. When he talks about how Americans are “giving up on the political process because they understand the economy is rigged,” how they are “working longer hours for low wages and worrying about the future of their kids,” he sounds more like Obama’s Republican critics than his heir.

Then again, at a time when only one-fourth of the public thinks the nation is on the right track, Clinton sometimes seems eager to keep the president at arm’s length, as well. After Sanders delivered his gloomy opening statement about the unfairness and unhappiness of modern-day America, Clinton agreed—“Yes, of course the economy has not been working for most Americans”—except to reframe his critique in identity-politics terms. “There’s also the continuing challenges of racism, of sexism, of discrimination against the LGBT community,” she said. The problem for Clinton is that she makes even less sense as an anti-establishment Democrat than Sanders makes as an establishment Democrat.

Still, Clinton can tweak her message to make it rosier or gloomier, or more or less pro-Obama, without raising existential questions about her political identity. She’s not the purity candidate. She’s not calling for a revolution. But as the Sanders campaign evolves from a crusade against campaign-finance-driven injustice to a more traditional quest for power, he’s going to have to figure out a way to reconcile his twin beliefs that America is a corrupt disaster in need of a revolution and that America has come a long way in the Obama era. He often evokes the familiar Democratic theme of two Americas, rich and poor, but the Radical’s Dilemma is about the other two Americas: unchangeable and changing.