Former President Barack Obama took a veiled, yet fairly clear, shot at Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren when he told a group that Americans don’t “think that we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.”

At a meeting of the Democracy Alliance on Friday, Obama cautioned against the sort of “revolutionary” change that the Senators from Vermont and Massachusetts are proposing, without mentioning their names. From The Washington Post:

“This is still a country that is less revolutionary than it is interested in improvement,” Obama said. “They like seeing things improved. But the average American doesn’t think that we have to completely tear down the system and remake it. And I think it’s important for us not to lose sight of that.” Obama did not name any candidates. But some Democrats associate the characteristics he described with Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), staunch liberal candidates advocating sweeping change who are running near the top of the polls. … “My point is that even as we push the envelope and we are bold in our vision, we also have to be rooted in reality and the fact that voters, including Democratic voters and certainly persuadable independents or even moderate Republicans, are not driven by the same views that are reflected on certain, you know, left-leaning Twitter feeds or the activist wing of our party,” he said.

Warren and Sanders have built their campaigns, respectively, around notions of “fundamental structural change” and “political revolution,” and derided comparatively moderate candidates. At a July debate, Warren zinged former Congressman John Delaney for criticizing her plans as unrealistic.

“I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for,” Warren said.

Listen to Obama’s remarks above, via CNN.

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