CHARLESTON, South Carolina — It’s a cliché that after every presidential debate, campaign advisers head to the “spin room” to declare to reporters that “there was only one president on the stage tonight,” and it was the candidate they work for.
But at the NBC News/YouTube debate here Sunday night, Bernie Sanders won by sounding more revolutionary than presidential. That’s no surprise for Sanders, who has adopted the posture of an outsider insurgent for his entire career and made “political revolution” a slogan of his 2016 presidential campaign.
But with the possibility that he could make it to the White House no longer unfathomable, does Bernie Sanders actually want to be president?
It’s a seemingly stupid question to ask about a person who has worked themselves to the point of exhaustion every day for the past eight months to achieve that goal. But when Sanders got into the 2016 race with an announcement at a hastily arranged press conference behind the Capitol building in April, everyone assumed the answer was obviously “no.”
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While he denied it, of course, the world assumed that Sanders was there to influence the political conversation, raise issues important to his movement, and to push presumed nominee Hillary Clinton to the left. Many compared him to Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican who ran for president twice — with no hope of winning — on a message of revolution.
That analysis served fine for most the campaign. But something changed when the calendar turned to 2016: For the first time, if you squint hard enough, you can see Bernie Sanders putting his right hand on the Torah as Chief Justice John Roberts administers the oath of office on the steps of the Capitol in a year’s time.
He now leads the polls in New Hampshire, has closed the gap in Iowa, and is eating into Clinton’s large national lead with just days to go before the first party nominating contests. Winning the Democratic nomination no longer seems out of Sanders’ reach, and that means the presidency isn’t either. Polls testing hypothetical general election match ups — as statistically unreliable as they are this far out — show Sanders beating most Republican candidates, and in some cases by larger margins than Clinton.
Sanders is beginning to let his imagination go there. After the State of the Union address last week, he admitted to NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt that, as he sat in the House chamber watching Obama give his final State of the Union address, he imagined himself giving the presidential address. “Well, actually, to be honest with you, that thought did go through my head,” he said with a sheepish laugh. “Yes, it did.”
Even if the probability of a Bernie Sanders presidency only climbed from zero to slightly more than zero, it’s still a development that’s leading many, including the Clinton campaign, to call for holding his candidacy to a higher standard than the one it’s been judged against thus far. On Monday, a slew of wonky liberal columnists turned a more critical lens on Sanders after he released his single-payer health plan Sunday.
Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate New York Times columnist, essentially accused Sanders of selling his supporters a bill of goods with the health care plan. “[F]or all the talk about being honest and upfront, even Sanders ended up delivering mostly smoke and mirrors,” Krugman wrote.
Ezra Klein, the Vox founder who is a trusted voice on the left on health reform, last week took Clinton to task for a disingenuous attack on Sanders’ health care plan. But on Monday, he eviscerated Sanders’ plan, calling it a “puppies-and-rainbows” fantasy.
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Klein’s colleague Matt Yglesias, widened his scope to point out a number of other Sanders platform items that are more slogan than policy. And New York writer Jonathan Chait took a wider view still, challenging the entire premise of the Sanders’ campaign.
The silver lining for Sanders is it means people are taking him seriously. But they’re raising their expectations for him, as well.
The new reality of Sanders’ position in the race “means that we in the media need to start taking his campaign seriously,” Yglesias wrote, “but also that Sanders himself needs to take his campaign seriously.”








