As Democrats mull how change works, consider Obama

Bernie Sanders' light sketch of single-payer healthcare Utopia has got Democrats debating their theory of change. Generate mass support for fundamental restructurings -- of healthcare, banking, wage law --or take any step you can, by legislative compromise or executive order, to make current institutions more progressive?

Obama is often held up these days as a proto-Bernie who stoked the thirst for swift transformation in 2007-8 and then disappointed. But if  Hope and Change was the Obama trumpet call, his bass note was always slow, hard, pragmatic step-by-step progress.

Even at his most apparently messianic, Obama has always stressed the incremental nature of change for the better. As I've noted more than once, the key words here, on the night he clinched the Democratic nomination in 2008, are began to:

The moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow

Not to minimize the dangers posed either by ISIS or Trumpism, but the odds are pretty good that both will fairly swiftly end up in the ashcan of history. Meanwhile, as we in the US obsess about both, a 195-nation climae accord has been negotiated in Paris that may lay the foundation for  continued human progress without catastrophic interruption.

While the US is maintaining a relatively low profile at the conclusion, the accord would not have been possible without forceful and effective climate action on the part of the Obama administration and the long, intensive efforts of John Kerry. Thank God we have a president who knows what's most important, knows how to prioritize and persist.

Obama was mocked for grandiosity when he laid out this hope on the night he secured the Democratic nomination in 2008 (my emphasis):