In the midst of a fierce pri­ma­ry con­test, Hillary Clin­ton has laid into her oppo­nent: ​“I could stand up here and say, ​‘Let’s just get every­body togeth­er. Let’s get uni­fied. The sky will open. The light will come down. Celes­tial choirs will be singing, and every­one will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.”

Candidate Obama, now a hallowed progressive icon, faced a barrage of identical attacks back in 2008.

“You are not going to wave a mag­ic wand and have the spe­cial inter­ests dis­ap­pear,” she added.

This wasn’t Clin­ton in 2016 attack­ing her oppo­nent, Ver­mont Sen­a­tor Bernie Sanders, for what she and her sup­port­ers view as his unre­al­is­tic and fan­tas­ti­cal promis­es to the Amer­i­can peo­ple. This was Clin­ton in 2008, launch­ing a sting­ing, sar­cas­tic rebuke to her then-Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­ma­ry oppo­nent, Illi­nois Sen­a­tor Barack Oba­ma, and his vague pledges of ​“hope” and ​“change.”

It’s easy to for­get now, but just about every attack that has been lobbed against Sanders thus far in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic race was once hurled against Oba­ma. Since then, how­ev­er, Oba­ma has gone from being cast as a speechi­fy­ing light­weight by Clin­ton to an accom­plished stan­dard-bear­er for progressivism.

The charges of blind ide­al­ism have per­haps the clear­est par­al­lels. Lib­er­al writ­ers like Jonathan Chait have deemed Sanders’ plat­form as hav­ing ​“zero chance of enact­ment,” while Clin­ton, in words eeri­ly sim­i­lar to her 2008 speech about Oba­ma, said recent­ly of Sanders, ​“I wish that we could elect a Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­dent who could wave a mag­ic wand and say, ​‘We shall do this, and we shall do that.’ That ain’t the real world we’re liv­ing in!”

“I am not inter­est­ed in ideas that sound good on paper but will nev­er make it in real life,” she said as the Iowa Cau­cus­es approached this year. The speech echoed her words in 2008, when she told a Texas crowd that ​“I am in the solu­tions busi­ness. My oppo­nent is in the promis­es business.”

These cri­tiques all rest on the idea of the Clin­ton as the clear-head­ed prag­ma­tist ​“who gets things done” in com­par­i­son to ide­al­is­tic and uncom­pro­mis­ing dream­ers like Sanders and Oba­ma. (But in con­trast with Oba­ma in 2008, Sanders actu­al­ly has an impres­sive record of accom­plish­ments in Con­gress and is well-versed in the kind of grimy, incre­men­tal work involved in pass­ing legislation.)

In 2008, the New York Times report­ed Clinton’s advis­ers charg­ing that Obama’s tax cuts were ​“unre­al­is­tic” and ​“would end up for­feit­ing the Democ­rats’ hard-won rep­u­ta­tion for fis­cal dis­ci­pline.” Clin­ton also called Oba­ma ​“irre­spon­si­ble and frankly naïve” for want­i­ng to meet ene­my lead­ers with­out preconditions.

Both of these crit­i­cisms may sound famil­iar to any­one keep­ing up with the present Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­test. Clin­ton has fret­ted that Sanders’ sin­gle-pay­er health care plan would some­how jeop­ar­dize the hard-fought Afford­able Care Act, and she and one of her advis­ers crit­i­cized Sanders’ sug­ges­tion that the Unit­ed States should nor­mal­ize rela­tions with Iran, say­ing, ​“It’s pret­ty clear that he just hasn’t thought it through.”

Oba­ma and Sanders have both also faced accu­sa­tions that they are more style than sub­stance. ​“This oth­er guy’s mad­der than she is, and that feels authen­tic,” Bill Clin­ton recent­ly said about Sanders. ​“And besides, his slo­gans are eas­i­er to say.” Vox​’s Matthew Ygle­sias has sim­i­lar­ly charged that ​“Sanders’ Wall Street plan is a slo­gan” and has chal­lenged the sen­a­tor to move past mere rhetoric and offer con­crete, detailed pol­i­cy proposals.

Can­di­date Oba­ma, now a hal­lowed pro­gres­sive icon brought up by Clin­ton dur­ing the pri­ma­ry fight, faced a bar­rage of iden­ti­cal attacks back in 2008. Oba­ma had ​“hyp­no­tized” the media with a ​“shal­low cam­paign slo­gan” and his poli­cies lacked specifics, pun­dits said. ​“There’s a big dif­fer­ence between us— speech­es ver­sus solu­tions, talk ver­sus action,” Clin­ton said in 2008. ​“Speech­es don’t put food on the table. Speech­es don’t fill up your tank or fill your pre­scrip­tion or do any­thing about that stack of bills that keeps you up at night.”

Sanders has also been called une­lec­table by Clin­ton and her sup­port­ers for his embrace of the label ​“social­ist,” warn­ing that a Sanders nom­i­na­tion would be a huge gift to the GOP. It’s a line of attack that can­di­date Oba­ma also had to with­stand eight years ago.

Fears about Obama’s ​“elec­tabil­i­ty” (which some at the time viewed as a cod­ed ref­er­ence to race) were the cor­ner­stone of Clinton’s cam­paign. ​“I’ve seen a lot of elec­tions come and go and who­ev­er our Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­nee is will be sub­ject­ed to the full force and effect of the Repub­li­can attack machine,” Clin­ton cau­tioned in 2007.

Per­haps the most con­tentious attacks faced by both cam­paigns have been alle­ga­tions of sex­ism and oth­er crit­i­cisms of the can­di­dates’ respec­tive sup­port­ers. In the 2016 cam­paign, this has tak­en the form of the alleged ​“Bernie Bro” phe­nom­e­non, the army of fanat­i­cal, intol­er­ant and/​or misog­y­nis­tic young, male Sanders sup­port­ers who harass any­one dar­ing to express a pro-Clin­ton sen­ti­ment online.

The nar­ra­tive has gained trac­tion despite the fact that Sanders con­sis­tent­ly out­polls Clin­ton among young women, with lib­er­al pun­dit Paul Krug­man repeat­ed­ly invok­ing the term to dele­git­imize crit­i­cism of Clin­ton. Most recent­ly, in the midst of a string of anti-Sanders attacks, Bill Clin­ton com­plained that Clin­ton back­ers have been ​“sub­ject to attacks that are lit­er­al­ly too pro­fane, often — not to men­tion sex­ist — to repeat.”

Vot­ing for a can­di­date based on their sup­port­ers’ actions is non­sen­si­cal. But these alle­ga­tions are also vir­tu­al­ly iden­ti­cal to those launched by the Clin­ton camp in 2008. Oba­ma was reg­u­lar­ly accused of run­ning a sex­ist cam­paign, so much so that there was a notable con­tin­gent of Clin­ton sup­port­ers who threat­ened to vote for John McCain in the gen­er­al elec­tion out of spite. Then there was 2008’s ver­sion of the ​“Bernie Bros”, a spate of sto­ries from pro-Clin­ton pun­dits about Obama’s ​“creepy,” ​“cult-like” sup­port­ers. As in 2016, Krug­man joined the fray, com­plain­ing that Obama’s cam­paign was ​“dan­ger­ous­ly close to becom­ing a cult of per­son­al­i­ty” and declar­ing that ​“most of the ven­om I see is com­ing from sup­port­ers of Mr. Obama.”

The point of all this is not to say whether these alle­ga­tions are right or wrong. Per­haps Oba­ma and Sanders both do over-rely on rhetoric over con­crete poli­cies. Maybe they are too ide­al­is­tic for their own good. But despite these per­ceived short­com­ings, the lib­er­al estab­lish­ment large­ly embraced Oba­ma after the 2008 elec­tion. Krug­man him­self went on to describe Oba­ma as ​“one of the most con­se­quen­tial and, yes, suc­cess­ful pres­i­dents in Amer­i­can his­to­ry.” It’s bizarre to see Clin­ton and her loy­al­ists trum­pet the same crit­i­cisms against Sanders as they did against Oba­ma in 2008 — while at the same time try­ing to posi­tion Clin­ton as the heir to Obama’s lega­cy.

If these sup­posed flaws weren’t enough to stop Oba­ma from becom­ing a suc­cess­ful pres­i­dent (at least in the eyes of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty), it’s hard to see why they would do so for a Pres­i­dent Sanders. It’s time the Clin­ton camp updat­ed their playbook.