Bernie Sanders: 'If I Run, I Will Run to Win'
Dylan Stableford, Yahoo! News
resh off his 2016 fact-finding trip to Iowa, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders says if he runs for president, it will be for one reason.
"If I run, I will run to win," Sanders, 73, said Tuesday at a CNN/National Journal event in Washington, D.C., dismissing the notion that his interest is to play spoiler for Hillary Clinton's potential bid for the Democratic nomination.
"I can't walk down the street without being asked about Hillary," the self-proclaimed "democratic socialist" and longest-serving independent member of Congress said. "If I decide to run for president, it's not against Hillary Clinton."
On Sunday's "Meet the Press," Sanders said he is considering a run for president — as a Democrat.
"I am thinking about running for president," Sanders said. "Running as a Democrat — that’s something that I’m looking at right now."
A CNN/ORC poll released before his trip to the Hawkeye State showed Clinton with a 38-point lead over potential challengers in Iowa, with 53 percent of registered Democrats favoring the former secretary of state. Vice President Joe Biden, at 15 percent, was a distant second, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren (7 percent) and Sanders (5 percent) sat even further back.
Still, Sanders scoffed at pundits who are anointing Clinton as the Democratic nominee before she even announces her candidacy. "I don't think anybody believes that anointment is a good idea, that anybody is 'entitled to a nomination' or any other position," he told CNN last week.
But Sanders knows his progressive platform — taking on billionaires, climate change deniers and critics of nationalized health care — would make it difficult to compete against more moderate Democrats.
"The only way somebody with my politics can get elected is by putting together an unprecedented grass-roots movement," he said on Tuesday. "If I were a billionaire, it might make very simple common-sense to run as an independent, because you have the money to develop independent political infrastructure in 50 states. I don't have that money."
If he does run, expect to hear these vintage recordings of the Brooklyn-born Sanders singing folk songs mocked by his opponents on the trail.
Vermont alt-weekly Seven Days reports that in 1987, then-Burlington Mayor Bernie Sanders recorded an album of folk classics, including "This Land Is Your Land," "Oh Freedom" and "We Shall Overcome," each featuring the future congressman's guttural "Brooklyn-strained-through-a-wood-chipper accent."
The resulting album, distributed in record stores throughout Vermont, sold a respectable few hundred copies — "many to conservatives who bought them as gag gifts."
“As talented of a guy as he is, he has absolutely not one musical bone in his body, and that became painfully obvious from the get-go,” Todd Lockwood, who produced the album, told the paper. “This is a guy who couldn’t even tap his foot to music coming over the radio. No sense of melody. No sense of rhythm — the rhythm part surprised me, because he has good rhythm when he’s delivering a speech in public.”
LISTEN TO AUDIOS