TIME Newsmaker Interview: Bernie Sanders Says He’d Make a Better President Than Hillary Clinton [View all]

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TIME Newsmaker Interview: Bernie Sanders Says He’d Make a Better President Than Hillary Clinton

Jay Newton-Small / Washington @JNSmall

March 5, 2014


With his white hair in characteristic disarray, Sen. Bernie Sanders is slouching on the couch in his office on the third floor of the Senate Dirksen Office Building between two brass-eagle themed lamps. His left foot is propped on the coffee table in front of him. But the Vermont Independent, and self-described socialist, is no slouch. He’s a man who has achieved a series of improbable victories and who is setting his sights on the toughest yet victory of his long career: the White House.

“When I first ran for office statewide in Vermont, I got two percent of the vote. I ran again, I got 1 percent of the vote. So, last election I got 71 percent of the vote,” Sanders tells TIME in an exclusive interview. “We need candidates who are prepared to represent the working families of this country, who are prepared to stand up to the big money interests, who are prepared to support an aggressive agenda to expand the middle class. And I am prepared to be that candidate. If there are other candidates who come forward who can do it better than me, that’s fine. I don’t again wake up with a burning ambition to be President of the United States.”

Sanders, who is the longest-serving Independent in congressional history, would have to officially register as a Democrat before he could run in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary. But he says he hasn’t yet made up his mind for sure if he’ll run, and he has time yet. One thing he is sure of: He’d make a better President than Hillary Clinton.

Clinton, he says, “is a very, very intelligent person, no question about it. But, I don’t know what her political future is, whether she’s going to run. I don’t know what she’s going to say. But, if you talk about the need for a political revolution in America, it’s fair to say that Secretary Clinton probably will not be one of the more active people.”

And a political revolution is exactly what Sanders believes this country is crying out for: “What we need is a political revolution in which grassroots America—and that is primarily working people who are fighting for their lives right now economically—have got to come together to make everybody understand that we are the majority of the American people and not the Koch brothers and not Sheldon Adelson, and not the other billionaires today who have huge influence over the economic and political life of the nation. And that’s not easily done. It’s easier to talk about it than do it.”

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http://time.com/13328/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-2016/