Jonathan Chait has an absolutely superb assessment of two Democratic worlds competing in both Iowa and altogether different universes:
As Sanders has risen in the polls, Clinton has placed less emphasis on the aspirational elements of her platform, which stand little chance of enactment. (If they did, Obama would probably have enacted them.) Instead she has stressed the importance of preventing the GOP from winning the presidency, which would give it full control of government and the ability to roll back many of Obama’s achievements. Her television ad in Iowa presents her as the candidate who will "stop the Republicans from ripping all our progress away"….
Sanders’s ad does not depict any Republicans at all. Indeed, they barely feature in his rhetoric. The salient question Sanders offers his audiences is not whether a Republican president will sign Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell’s bills or a Democratic one will veto them; it is whether the people prevail or corporate interests do.
Concludes Chait: "In place of any practical road map to enacting his ideas, Sanders substitutes the 'political revolution,' an event he invokes constantly that will sweep aside all impediments. His appeal borrows more from the tea party than from" Senator Obama's inspiring yet reality-grounded rhetoric of 2008.
Chair enjoys playing the iconoclastic, base-challenging curmudgeon, but here he seems genuinely panicked. Perhaps he has reason to be.
We're now in the six- or seven-year wake of the right's intoxicated tea-party affair, which, at long last, is orgasmically exhausting itself in the extremes of Trumpism and Ted Cruz. Untether a party from the empirical realities of day-to-day governance and fix it instead on the gossamer fantasies of People Power and one hasn't an organized party for long. One has, rather, an anarchic assemblage of utterly useless wistfulness. Pluralism is a resistant, durable thing in which one's numerous enemies — that would be other People with plentiful Power — have a big say. Denying the durability of this singular "ism" of American politics is the oldest and surest route to political obscurity.
Well, so much for the tea partiers, or so we thought. What we didn't know was that People-Powered-tea-party envy would take hold on the left and begin imagining that the opposition simply doesn't — or won't in the near future — exist. The left will put its man in the White House, and that will be that. Oligarchs and greedy corporatists and Big Pharma and campaign financiers and Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell will all buckle under the oppressive weight of White-House-taking People Power (which in its spare moments from now till November — one presumes? — will also populate Congress with ultraprogressive supermajorities). It shall be as simple as that, hence triumphalism is already well under way.
As is some sizable anxiety on the realistic left. To what dimensions will its tea-partying wing grow? Will the party catch itself before heaving same over the cliff? Chait's panic (admittedly only a seeming panic) may be of sounder stuff than my guess, but I suspect the party will. Nonetheless, for the Clinton camp it's going to be a hair-raising few weeks until the situation, as they say, stabilizes.