Yes and no.
Hillary Clinton had a lot of plans, yes, but they were essentially in service of a narrative which read "things are essentially good and have been for the past 8 years. Here are a list of small tweaks I'm going to make to tune up the engine in order to expand on an essentially good system," whereas Bernie is saying "no the system is totally broken and has been screwing over ordinary people for thirty years, here's how we totally rebuild the system from the ground up to actually help people." Donald Trump demonstrated conclusively the veracity of the latter statement and the utter intellectual bankruptcy of the former. Sure things have been good for the coastal élite and investment bankers, but the laboring class in Michigan, in Wisconsin, in Iowa, in Pennsylvania, etc. have been getting totally f'd over for years. Hillary lost on a platform of "things are good something something incremental change." Any candidate running on the same platform will lose again in 2020. If it's Biden we will lose period.
Secondly, I think Hillary's big problem with her plans (and incidentally a problem I see in Warren's campaign), was that Hillary's plans were framed in this technocratic expert device. Hillary's fundamental message was "give me the power and I will tweak the system in the following ways." The call to action in Hillary's campaign was simply to place your face in her, the anointed expert. Which has the dual problem of a) playing into the above optics-problem of an ivory tower coastal elite telling ordinary people they're essentially good in direct contradiction of their actual lived experiences, and b) doesn't actually motivate anybody for whom that message of "the Obama years have been good," might actually resonate. If all you're asking of a supporter is to "Be With Her," then that's all they're going to do. Bernie's "plans," by contrast read much more as a declaration of principles for a movement. They serve merely to make concrete and possible to people what up to this point were viewed merely as "nice ideas, but there's no way they're practical." The Green New Deal is essentially the same sort of idea: "Yeah yeah, fight climate change, let's do that...NO! here are the specifics we must, and in fact CAN work towards." I think Bernie is also aided in this political framing by his slogan and the way he presents his campaign. It's literally the exact opposite of Hillary's campaign. As I said, Hillary's slogan was "I'm with her," as in "place all of your faith in me and I will do the rest." Bernie's is "Not me, us." It's a direct call to action. Hillary's plan signalled to me "oh yeah, there's nothing objectionable about that, hope that happens." Bernie's makes me want to get up and join a picket line. I think there's a profound difference between the two campaigns.
So I said yes and no- what I mean by that is that no because there's no "wisening up" to be done here on the part of voters. You can pull it up, but I distinctly remember posting to this site on election night something to the effect of the wrongness of blaming voters for electing Trump for "voting against their interests," whatever that means. The way a voter votes is by definition "in their interests." It is not the responsibility of a voter to divine some absolute Hegelian/Socratic essence of the National Interest in the first part because that's fundamentally undemocratic, and on the second because such a thing axiomatically does not and cannot exist. On the other hand, I hesitate to say this is a "Bernie has wizened up" situation because his message in 2019 is more or less the same as it was in 2015-16, the difference, inasmuch as it exists, is that Bernie's objective, from my perspective, in 2015-16 was to get Medicare 4 All and Fight For 15 into public discourse and little more, and here in 2019, it seems that Bernie either has the same essential goal but is much more ambitious in his overall objectives (i.e. creating an actual labor movement for the first time in this country in 40 years) or else sees the presidency as an actually attainable goal this time, and so is actually articulating his manifesto more robustly. I will say though, that the Democratic party has definitively wizened up though. The Overton Window has definitely shifted left, and the candidates have all recognized the importance of appealing to the populist "middle" of this country. Biden is essentially running a carbon copy of Hillary's policy platform and he is coming across as an out-of-touch incoherent buffoon, and I think that says a lot about how dramatically the political milieu has changed in the last three years.
