See his article here. An excerpt:
"But Sanders genuinely, sincerely, does not care about optics. He is
the rarest of Washington animals, a completely honest person. If he's
motivated by anything other than a desire to use his influence to
protect people who can't protect themselves, I've never seen it. Bernie
Sanders is the kind of person who goes to bed at night thinking about
how to increase the heating-oil aid program for the poor.
"This is why his entrance into the 2016 presidential race
is a great thing and not a mere footnote to the inevitable coronation
of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee. If the press is smart
enough to grasp it, his entrance into the race makes for a profound
storyline that could force all of us to ask some very uncomfortable
questions."
"But
the lapdog mentality is deeply ingrained and most Beltway scribes
prefer to wait for a signal from above before they agree to take anyone
not sitting atop a mountain of cash seriously. Thus this whole question
of "seriousness"
– which will dominate coverage of the Sanders campaign – should really
be read as a profound indictment of our political system, which is now
so openly an oligarchy that any politician who doesn't have the blessing
of the bosses is marginalized before he or she steps into the ring."
Taibbi: When I first met Bernie Sanders, I'd just spent over a decade living in formerly communist Russia. The word "socialist" therefore had highly negative connotations for me, to the point where I didn't even like to say it out loud. But Bernie Sanders is not Bukharin or Trotsky. His concept of "Democratic Socialism" as I've come to understand it over the years is that an elected government should occasionally step in and offer an objection or two toward our progress to undisguised oligarchy. Or, as in the case of not giving tax breaks to companies who move factories overseas, our government should at least not finance the disappearance of the middle class. Maybe that does qualify as radical and unserious politics in our day and age. If that's the case, we should at least admit how much trouble we're in.
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