Obama came into office with the same idea, then expended pretty much all of his political capital on passing the ACA. Lessig's plan seems to be on the same order.
Obama's ideas were never made very clear during his campaign. It was all "hope" and "change" and not a whole lot on policy specifics.
He then went and implemented the same neoliberal bullshit that George Bush pushed with a slightly different flavor.
Now we have a Nobel peace price winning president who regularly orders extrajudicial assassinations and prosecutes anyone blowing the whistle on the runaway national security/military-industrial complexes. So much for "the most transparent administration in history," the guy who was going to close Gitmo and stop the serial wars all across the Middle East.
They're not the same at all. Sanders has a long history in Congress. Obama was a junior first term senator. Sanders is very specific about what he'll do. Obama was deliberately vague.
Not sure if Sanders has changed here, he's not as viciously anti-gun, he's changed his language recently but, not, based on what I was just able to dig up, his real positions.