"The campaigns are different," Axelrod says. "Obama’s was not really an ideological campaign. There was a big difference on the war, but Obama was not the candidate of the left. John Edwards was the candidate of the left in Iowa. The left was often suspicious of Obama because of his approach, which is, '80 percent is better than nothing.'"
"The assumption that Sanders has," Axelrod continues, "is that the American people support his positions on every issue and if you just move money out of the way, those positions would prevail. On a question like single-payer, that’s not true. I support single-payer health care, but having gone through health reform, we couldn’t even get a national consensus around the public option! It was Democratic votes that were ultimately missing on that issue."
This is a place where the Obamaites, looking back, feel that Obama's message was often misunderstood — his optimism sometimes masked his incrementalism.
"Obama promised change," Dunn says, "not a revolution."