Bernie Sanders may be running … for all the right reasons

Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders is not a man given to despair.

If he was, the only declared socialist to serve in the Club of 100 would have given up decades ago.

Instead, Sanders is criss-crossing the country, speaking in union halls to appreciative crowds about solutions to problems that you’d never hear from anybody else on the ballot.

But there did come a moment in a brief chat with journalists after a speech to union members at the Culinary Local 226 meeting hall on Tuesday that Sanders did allow a tiny moment of gloom.

“It is possible that it may be too late,” he said. “It is possible that these people are so powerful, they have so much money, that they may not able to be beaten in the immediate future. But I am not going to give up hope. I’m not going to give up hope that if we organize millions of people, like the people who came out today, I believe we can beat them. I believe we can. But it is certainly going to be a very, very difficult fight, given their power, given their money.”

For the record, by “these people,” Sanders means the billionaire class that he says has profited enormously in recent years, even as the middle class is squeezed even harder. His speeches are peppered with statistics on this point: 45 million Americans living in poverty; unemployment — real unemployment, including people who have given up looking for hard-to-find jobs or can only find part-time jobs — at 11 percent; youth unemployment at 17 percent; 35 million Americans still without health insurance.

Meanwhile, the top 1 percent own 42 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 60 percent own less than 2 percent; the top 1/10th of 1 percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; and, according to Forbes, the wealthiest 14 people in the country saw their fortunes increase by $157 billion between 2013 and this year. “Enough is enough,” Sanders declared. “The wealthiest people have to start paying their fair share in taxes.”

Sanders’ solutions? A $1 trillion push to fix infrastructure, reforming trade agreements to discourage shipping jobs overseas, raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour and making college tuition at public universities and colleges free. Oh, and health care? It would be a right guaranteed to every American under a Sanders administration.

So what are the odds we’ll see a Sanders campaign? The senator is cagey about that, but not for the reasons you’d think. He fears a losing campaign not for his own ego, but for the consequences to his ideas.

“If I run a campaign for president, and I do badly, it’s not my ego that suffers, it’s their lives, because it’s the banner that we’re carrying, the issues that we’re carrying,” he says. “If we do not do well, then our opposition says, ‘See? Nobody really wants to raise the minimum wage. Nobody really believes in national health care for all. Nobody believes that the rich should pay more in taxes. Nobody believes in the need to create millions of jobs.’ So a bad campaign will be very bad for working families in America. That’s why if you do it, it has to be done well.”

And that means testing the waters in precisely the way he is now, in places such as Austin, Texas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and here in Las Vegas. It means figuring out if a grassroots coalition of millions can be assembled, coalesce around a real middle-class agenda and not be distracted by wedge issues.

“It’s not a question of starting some academic debate. It’s a question of representing those [working-class] people,” he said.”People are giving up on democracy, giving up on the political process. They think that the billionaires are too powerful to be defeated. … We need to mobilize people and educate people to fight for the American middle class.”

Sounds like the triumph of hope over despair.

Steve Sebelius is a Review-Journal political columnist who blogs at SlashPolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter (@SteveSebelius) or reach him at 702-387-5276 or SSebelius@reviewjournal.com.