Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine.

In the eighth year of the Barack Obama administration, it’s not surprising that the Republican debates have portrayed America as a fallen wasteland of broken dreams. But last night, the Democratic candidates sounded almost as gloomy about the country they hope to lead, even as they lavished praise on the Democrat who’s currently leading it.

Bernie Sanders, the crotchety socialist who was probably born in a bad mood 74 years ago, was even more relentlessly negative than usual, making the U.S. economy sound like an oy-vey sequel to The Grapes of Wrath. He bemoaned how “almost everyone is getting poorer,” how ordinary Americans are “worried to death about the future of their kids,” how “there is massive despair all over this country.” He spoke of seniors who are “cutting their pills in half…don’t have decent nutrition…can’t heat their homes in the wintertime.” He complained that a rigged economic system and a corrupt political system have created “a moment of serious crises”—an unemployment crisis, health insurance crisis, infrastructure crisis, child poverty crisis, and a dispiriting sense that our crippling problems can’t be solved.


Hillary Clinton, the mainstream Democrat who served in the Obama Cabinet, did not push back against this dystopic vision of a nation in pain. She repeatedly pointed out that she agrees with Sanders that too many Americans are getting left behind, that “yes, the economy is rigged in favor of those at the top.” Her main critique of the Sanders critique was that it lacked identity-politics specificity, that it didn’t recognize the unique challenges of “really systemic racism” against blacks, of “hardworking immigrant families living in fear,” of women’s rights that are “under tremendous attack,” of “discrimination against the LGBT community,” even of the struggles in coal country and other downtrodden white communities “where we are seeing an increase in alcoholism, addiction, earlier deaths.”

Perhaps this doom-and-gloom-a-thon was predictable after Sanders and Donald Trump rode their messages of malaise to victory in New Hampshire, which had a 3 percent unemployment rate to go along with America’s lowest murder rate and poverty rate. Today, only one quarter of Americans believe the country is on the right track. Still, it was striking that after a record 71 months of employment growth that have created 14 million new jobs, at a time when gasoline is cheap and health care inflation is at the lowest level in half a century and the federal deficit has dropped by more than two thirds, the party in power was essentially embracing the Republican view of America as a dumpster fire.

It was just as striking to hear Sanders and Clinton interrupt their depressing colloquies about the state of the country with gushing compliments for its leader. Obama has sky-high approval ratings among Democrats, and Clinton repeatedly wrapped herself in the Obama mantle, calling Hillarycare a precursor to Obamacare, praising his executive actions on immigration, boasting about her role in his nuclear deal with Iran as well as his decision to authorize the raid on Osama bin Laden. She also repeatedly accused Sanders of insufficient loyalty to the president—for criticizing his leadership, for downplaying his Wall Street reforms, for calling for a primary challenge in 2012, even for providing a blurb for a book portraying Obama as a disappointment to progressives. “The kind of criticism that we’ve heard from Senator Sanders about our president, I expect from Republicans,” she said. “I do not expect it from someone running for the Democratic nomination.”

Sanders reacted more vehemently to that accusation of disloyalty than he has reacted to anything Clinton has said in any of their debates. “Madam Secretary, that is a low blow,” he said. “It is really unfair to suggest that I have not been supportive of the president. I have been a strong ally of his on virtually every issue.” Sanders launched his own fiery defense of Obama’s record, arguing the president has done an “extraordinary job” after inheriting an economy losing 800,000 jobs a month, a $1.4 trillion deficit, and a collapsing financial system. “As a result of his efforts and Joe Biden’s efforts against unprecedented, unprecedented Republican obstructionism, we have made enormous progress,” Sanders said. He also pointed out that Clinton has not always been such an Obama fan: “One of us ran against Barack Obama. I was not that candidate.”

It is not necessarily inconsistent to argue that the country has made a lot of progress since the depths of the Great Recession and also that the progress has been insufficient. And the Democrats did not go nearly as far as Republicans have gone in describing the entire world as a chaotic nightmare that threatens our safety, a key element of the GOP case for a departure from the Obama era. But Republicans must be enjoying the spectacle of Democrats echoing their view of the economy—that it’s much worse than the 4.9 percent jobless rate suggests, that the middle class is getting crushed, that Americans have, as Clinton said, “good cause” to be angry—while simultaneously emphasizing their admiration of Obama. If 2016 is going to be an election about change, about Making America Great Again, it’s hard to see how that landscape favors Obama-loving Democrats.

And let’s face it: This is mostly a problem for Clinton. Sanders is perfectly comfortable as Chicken Little, campaigning with left-wing Obama critics like Cornel West, thundering about a nation getting devoured by “suicide, alcoholism, drugs.” If America is in crisis, if “we need to start paying attention to the needs of working families in this country,” then the Sanders argument that we also need a political revolution makes sense. It’s tougher to mobilize around the Clinton argument, which is that America is in crisis but we basically need to stay the course. There was a telling moment last night when Clinton argued that the slew of individual donors supporting her as well as Sanders “demonstrates the strength of the support we have among people who want to see change in our country.” In 2016, the candidate who served under Obama and supports just about all of Obama’s policies does not look like the candidate of change.

Of course, it’s possible that Clinton would be able to shift her message in a general election, to focus more on the progress America has made in adding jobs, reducing oil imports and carbon emissions, covering the uninsured, raising graduation rates, and bringing home soldiers since January 2009. Obama’s approval rating has climbed to 50 percent, and the Republican candidates remain unpopular, so it’s possible that the specter of Trump or Ted Cruz or another Republican in the White House would make the electorate feel better about the current direction of the country. For now, though, the candidates of both parties are spending their time on national television telling Americans the country is in shambles. The problem for Democrats is that Americans may believe them.