Bill Scher is the senior writer at the Campaign for America’s Future, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ” along with the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis.

In his endorsement of Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, Bernie Sanders sounded very much like he thought he was passing his mantle on to a Democrat who now stands alongside him in his “movement.” Sanders spoke of how he’d known her for 25 years, and that, like him, “Hillary Clinton knows that something is very wrong” with “income and wealth inequality” and will make the necessary fixes. “We have begun a political revolution to transform America and that revolution continues,” Sanders declared before the two candidates hugged and he relinquished the stage to the woman he called the next Democratic presidential nominee.

In fact, a close look at the debate over the Democratic platform in recent weeks suggests something very different. The failure of the Sandersnistas to win the platform fight over the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, in particular—one of the few “live” as opposed to merely aspirational policy goals of the Sanders campaign, not to mention Donald Trump’s—is an indication of what may be to come.


The TPP fight was nothing less than a proxy battle over who really steers the party ship. And the evidence is that Hillary still has the conn.

True, the Sanders movement has made enormous strides. Eight years ago, Democrats panicked when Republicans lambasted their presidential nominee as a socialist. Today, they are celebrating the blessing given by the nation’s most prominent socialist, Sanders, to their presumptive presidential nominee after letting his team write much of the party platform. And there will be no attack ads from Republicans accusing Clinton of consorting with socialists, because the Republican presidential nominee is too busy courting those same voters.

If you described the above scenario eight years ago—even one year ago—anyone on the left wing of the Democratic Party would tell you it was beyond their wildest dreams.

And yet, as the Sandernistas beam with pride reflecting how far they have come, a reminder of how far they have yet to go looms over Tuesday’s show of unity. Yes, Sanders leveraged his 22 state wins and 43 percent of the primary popular vote to install several platform planks that go outside of the Democratic establishment’s comfort zone. The initial draft embraced the restoration of rigid Glass-Steagall banking restrictions and a tax on Wall Street financial transactions—two positions from which Clinton previously kept her distance. The Sanders forces toughened up the platform in the committee’s final meeting, inserting an explicit call for a $15 minimum wage and a price on carbon pollution (albeit eschewing the “carbon tax” label). And in the run-up to the endorsement, Clinton wooed Sanders by souping up her college affordability plan to make it free for all families with a household income under $125,000 and touting a government-run public health insurance option, seen by some on the left as a stepping stone to Sanders’ vision of a “single-payer” health insurance system.

But all those pledges by the party platform committee and the nominee are mainly expressions of distant hope (or merely cosmetic, depending on your level of cynicism). And some of them don’t really constitute shifts leftward on Clinton’s part: She previously embraced a price on carbon and a public health insurance option in her 2008 campaign.

The one issue in which the platform could imminently influence an active issue before Congress is TPP, with President Obama campaigning to win a ratification vote for the agreement, most likely during the “lame-duck” session after Election Day.

The TPP issue goes to the heart of Bernie’s campaign, which has focused on the deterioration of America’s middle class under the mandate of unfair trade deals and other dimensions of globalization. And if the Sanders movement fails to make inroads on that question there is reason to think that other pledges laid down in the Democratic platform will remain little more than aspirational too.

Nearly everything on the Sanders wish list is aimed straight at the heart of corporate America. But going back to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Democrats have found it easier to advance their goals by compromising with corporate interests than trying to vanquish them. Any one of Sanders’ ambitious planks would spark an enormous clash that could sap a president of political capital with no guarantee of success: Just ask Bill Clinton, who barely hung on after his defeat at the hands of the health insurance lobby, or Jimmy Carter, who didn’t survive following his confrontation with Big Oil during the energy crisis of the late 1970s.

In the present case, the populists thought they had the establishment on the run on the TPP issue: Not only did Clinton abandon her support for TPP under pressure from Sanders, but Republican voters nominated a candidate who regularly doles out white-hot protectionist rhetoric. Spooked Republican congressional leaders, who only last year worked with Obama to enact “fast-track” rules that shield the TPP from filibusters and amendments, have kept the agreement under wraps.

Yet Obama is undeterred, and Clinton’s stated opposition is meaningless if he succeeds before her inauguration. Riding a wave of positive public opinion, Obama is utilizing both his bully pulpit and his reservoir of goodwill among Democrats. Sandwiched between last month’s defense of lowered trade barriers in Indiana, and an explicit defense of TPP at the North American Leaders Summit, he seized the stage of “The Tonight Show” to plug TPP during Jimmy Fallon’s signature bit, “Slow Jam the News.”

He blew past the charges of corporatism to tie his TPP support to more obviously liberal international deals with Iran and Cuba, and bopping to a tune by Rihanna, he pledged it will put people back to “work, work, work, work, work.” Obama delivered Sanders a not-so-subtle message: You’re not the only one with hipster cred in this fight.

That was just a warm-up to the platform showdown. According to the Washington Post, when Sanders and Obama met two days after the final primary contests, Sanders said “he would push for the party to officially oppose the TPP. The president said he would not allow it.”

Obama meant what he said, and the platform committee delegates tapped by Clinton and the Democratic National Committee backed him up. While Sanders supporters held up boxes representing 800,000 petition signatures against TPP, the Democratic establishment had a trump card: tacit support from the labor movement.

American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees President Lee Saunders proposed a compromise amendment at the platform committee meeting, “with the support of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” which read: “We will oppose trade agreements that do not support good American jobs” and detailed the standards that agreements should meet. All these criteria tracked the complaints the left has with TPP.

Yet while Saunders, and other union leaders that followed him at the microphone, said the amendment’s admonitions apply to TPP, the amendment itself did not explicitly mention TPP. Sanders’ unimpressed delegates furiously tried to add a specific rebuke to the platform along the lines of: “That’s why we oppose the TPP.” But union leaders left Bernie hanging, stuck with the nominee and the president, and kept the anti-TPP language out.

As with other points in his campaign, Sanders set expectations of success excessively high and came up short. If he had instructed his delegates to accept the Saunders amendment as a victory, exactly who got the upper hand in the battle would be murky.

Instead, the outcome is clear. It’s still Obama’s party. And that may have a tangible impact. If Trump’s virulently anti-TPP presidential bid self-destructs, Obama, having already pocketed the platform victory, can confidently stride into the lame-duck session. He can assure skittish congressional members that because the election was not a referendum on his final priority, it’s politically safe for them to replicate their fast-track vote.

Of course, Obama’s days in the White House are few, and it’s an open question after the turbulent primary whether a President Hillary Clinton would have as easy a time as Obama did containing unrest on the left that Sanders marshaled so effectively. If the Sanders wing of the party can maintain cohesion, it potentially has the capacity to shape, or break, any legislative deal Clinton is trying to squeeze through the system.

But Sanders commands proportionately fewer members of Congress than platform committee delegates. Only nine House members and one senator either endorsed him or pledged their superdelegate vote to him. For Sanders to win a battle with the Democratic establishment when a real policy issue is at stake, he needs to do what he said he would do as president: Tell Congress to “take a look out the window” and find that “there’s a million young people out there.”

Has Sanders left his mark on the Democratic Party? Absolutely. He has sharpened the points on the progressive North Star, with concrete, if still merely aspirational, goals for his young supporters to work toward. But a President Clinton would likely still have to grapple with a Republican House—few are predicting a complete Democratic takeover—leaving little room for grandiose reforms in the near-term. Even if there was a down-ballot Democratic wave, as President Obama learned, it takes only a few right-leaning Democrats to constrain a liberal presidential agenda.

Sanders and his supporters have a tendency to believe the eventual attainment of those goals is generationally pre-ordained. “Our vision will be the future of America!” he declared after California. This is not necessarily so. As political scientist Dave Hopkins explained to Vox last month, presidential candidates that win the votes of youthful idealists don’t necessarily win the future, citing the parallel example of George McGovern, whose liberal orthodoxy faded in the party after his failed presidential bid. In fact, the only McGovernite who ever became president was Bill Clinton, after having scrubbed the party of his old boss’ paleo-liberalism in favor the “Third Way” moderation, which the current Sanders insurgence is rebelling against.

If the Sandernistas are ever going to complete their revolution, they are going to have to figure out how to defeat the establishment when it counts. They haven’t done it yet.