Bernie Sanders for President in 2016?

The outspoken senator from Vermont, Congress’ only self-described socialist, said he would consider a 2016 run for the presidency if no one else with sufficiently left-wing values enters the race.

“Under normal times, it’s fine, you have a moderate Democrat running, a moderate Republican running,” Sanders told the Burlington Free Press on Friday. “These are not normal times. The United States right now is in the middle of a severe crisis and you have to call it what it is.”

Sanders previously suggested he might run for president in an October interview with labor advocacy magazine In These Times.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

Ned Resnikoff at MSNBC:

He’s not alone. Earlier this month, The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber suggested that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. might enter the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, where she would serve as a progressive foil to the more centrist Hillary Clinton. The activist group PCCC (Progressive Change Campaign Committee) has seized on the idea, and is trying to use Warren’s popularity to nudge other potential candidates further to the left on issues like financial reform and maintaining the welfare state.

A third-party presidential candidate running on a democratic socialist platform would be a long shot—to say the least—but it might be marginally less of a long shot than it was even a few years ago. American attitudes toward socialism are becoming gradually less negative, particularly among young people. That helps to explain why last week, city council candidate Kshama Sawant was able to become the first socialist to win citywide office in Seattle in at least a century.

But that doesn’t mean that a socialist candidate would stand even a remote chance of winning the presidency any time in the next few years. And if he ran, it appears that Sanders’ goal would not be to become president, but simply to force broader discussions of American capitalism, inequality and climate change during the campaign season.

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