BERNIE? – AT 11:52 A.M. ET:  Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, is considering a presidential run.  Is it laughable?  No, it's not.

I don't agree with Sanders, obviously, but there's a world of difference between him and some of the others on the left.  Bernie is a thinking man who comes off as decent and committed.  He won't get the Democratic nomination, but he can be a provocative voice for an issue that is growing dramatically in American life – the wealth gap.  I've written about this before.  Don't ignore it.  It's a legitimate issue that even has many thoughtful conservatives worried.  The gap between rich and poor, and even rich and middle class, has grown to alarming proportions, proportions that can threaten the stability of this country.

You don't have to be a socialist to wonder about the vast ratio between a CEO's salary and the average salary in his or her corporation.  The gap, on average, is the largest in the world and still growing.  Nor can you shrug this off as "the market."  Something has gone wrong.  Whether it's rigging at the top, the shortage of good jobs in manufacturing, or something else, it is riling plenty of people.  Elizabeth Warren talks about it, but she's a fraud, a woman worth about $14-million, but "worried" about the little guy.

No matter what you may think of Sanders, he's no fraud.  He can move the debate.  He can force candidates to come up with creative solutions, or force them to prove him wrong.  From AP:

Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders says he’ll decide by March whether to launch a 2016 presidential campaign and, if so, whether he’ll seek the Democratic nomination. Either way, Sanders says he wouldn’t run just to nudge the debate to the left.

“I don’t want to do it unless I can do it well,” he told The Associated Press. “I don’t want to do it unless we can win this thing.”

Sanders, a socialist, said he grew up “solidly lower middle class” in a Jewish family in Brooklyn — his father, an immigrant and Holocaust survivor from Poland, sold paint for a living —and his views about the distribution of wealth were formed early.

“A lack of money in my family was a very significant aspect of my growing up … kids in my class would have new jackets, new coats, and I would get hand-me-downs,” Sanders said.

After his graduation from the University of Chicago, Sanders spent time on a kibbutz in Israel. He then moved to Vermont in the 1960s as part of the counterculture, back-to-the-land movement that turned the state from solid Yankee Republican into one of the bluest in the country.

He won his first election — for Burlington mayor — by 10 votes, and since then has carried a consistent message thought eight terms in the House and now his second term in the Senate: The rich have too much, the poor and working class not enough.

Sanders said the issues about which he’s been railing all these years are only becoming more dire. The wealth gap has grown, and the middle class, he says, is “collapsing.”

“You have one family, the Walton family of Walmart, owning more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people,” he said. “We have 95 percent of all new income going to the top 1 percent. You have millions of families unable to afford to send their kids to college. People are desperately worried about whether or not they are going to retire with dignity.”

COMMENT:  Sanders has a great deal of warmth.  Do not dismiss him.  I welcome him to the debate as I welcome all serious, honest candidates, no matter what their view, as long as they are patriots. 

The Democratic Party, as it's currently constituted, has no chance of building a strong, fair economy.  The party ran out of ideas decades ago and just presents government programs.

But the Republican Party does have a chance of building a stronger economy that truly could improve the lot of all, an economy based on free enterprise, but yet one that needs fixin' from time to time to minimize the destabilizing imbalances we see now.  If Sanders can move the debate, he might force our side to be truly creative.

This could get interesting.

December 27, 2014