Americans: Bernie Sanders or Hilary Clinton

[Reforged]

Bernie should get in, Hilary *will* get in.
A science background is a handicap when it comes to getting in positions of political power. People will see him as stuck up, untrustworthy and in some circles; ungodly. People are morons who vote against their own best interests.

Not that it matters, every candidate is bought and paid for dozens of times before they get even remotely close to any real position of power. Its how they pay for their campaigns and its how private enterprise gets its interests looked after time after time. They'll both give a couple of throw away gestures on some relatively irrelevant and obvious topics everyone gets flustered about while sneaking in some backdoor policies to settle their debts.
Thats how the keys to the kingdom get systematically sold every four years to the highest bidder. You can make small changes but the big changes belong to private enterprise.

Whether a candidate is bought or not does matter, at least to some people. The fact that candidates are plenty often corrupt doesn't necessitate that all candidates are corruptible, certainly integrity exists, and some people really are passionate about the changes they would like to see in the world, and don't give a rat's left tonsil about money beyond what they need to live on plenty happy. 

Explain to me... who stands to gain from a given policy. That's where you track the representation of who's bought your candidate. WHO stands to gain. Someone always stands to gain. Of course... the presidency is more PR and guiding than anything, it's the legislature and supreme court that see by far the greatest prevalence of corruption, the local level governments at times too, if there's something important enough to a rich person at that level.

Great change can belong to the public... and it has in the past. The reason that our current situation is so... depressing... is that there ARE historical analogues. And they worked.

The system organically erodes integrity. Those who aren't willing to compromise themselves simply don't get near. They don't get the funding and they don't get the press. It isn't that they care about money in the beginning, some of them really don't, its that its needed to win. Thats all it takes, thats the window corruption gets in through. Presidents change but the people who buy them don't. They know the pressure points, they know the price of everything and they know how to shape policy to their own ends. If he isn't corrupt he won't get in.

Would we get stem cell research? Very likely. Would we get an end to this creationist nonsense in schools? Possibly.
Will we see an end to the systematic rape of poorer countries for their resources in exchange for profit? Will we see an end to the free sale and purchase of our personal data?  No. Never. That will never happen because these things are profitable and have huge money behind them. We have the illusion of choice. The public get scraps from the table carefully arranged to look like a prize winning turkey to distract us from the decadent feast going on in the background.