Bernie Sanders has been a tough candidate for me to decide on. He has the personal and political experience to be taken seriously. He has a vision that he believes in to sell to potential voters (as opposed to candidates who just have a pet issue). From all appearances he is a man of integrity who can be entrusted with whatever office voters choose to elect him to.
The hard part about deciding if he deserves an endorsement is that his vision for the nation seems to be unrealistic. If I were a voter who agreed with the vision that he is peddling for America I’m afraid that if he were elected I would find myself disappointed by a President Sanders who was unable to deliver much of anything on his vision for the nation. What he wants for the nation is so different in some fundamental ways from what we have built here that I think the best historical outcome he could hope for would be to have historians look back on him and declare that he was way ahead of his time.
That gap between the vision he lays out on the campaign trail and what feels possible even if there were enough voters buying into his vision to get him elected makes him feel more like those idealistic single-issue candidates that can’t get my endorsement. In the end I’ve concluded that Bernie Sanders is like Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul – a legitimate candidate who swings for the fences and excites a portion of the electorate but whose vision voters should take with a grain of salt even if they support him.
Those kinds of candidates are important for a healthy political process so I do endorse Bernie Sanders for president.
