Bernie Sanders does a tour of the South

And pretty much nails it. He also says he hasn’t ruled out running for president:

Sanders tells me the trip’s purpose is, in part, to identify potential candidates who could benefit from a small influx of cash next election cycle—“whether it’s independents, whether it’s third-party people or progressive Democrats…folks who have the courage to stand up to big money interests and represent working families.” The Senator’s political action committee, Progressive Voters of America, has raised about $300,000 over the last three election cycles for left-leaning Democrats in Congress. So far, the overwhelmingly majority of those candidates have been at the federal level, but Sanders is open to finding state-level candidates worthy of financial backing. After trouncing his 2012 Republican challenger 71 percent to 25 percent, it seems an opportune time for Sanders to lend his growing national clout to fellow economic populists.

By all accounts, the audiences were friendly—progressive, multiracial, and already supportive of Sanders’ agenda. They included people like Antonia Shields, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers’ Local 530 in Birmingham, who appreciate the Senator’s efforts to prevent cuts to the Postal Service. And Claire Stanton, a library assistant at the Birmingham Public Library who “tend[s] to think that a lot of the Democratic Senators are too centrist.” And Walter Simons, a part-time construction worker and artist in Birmingham who says he’s a socialist and came out because “there’s not a lot of socialists who get elected.”

But Sanders ultimately has his eyes set on winning over a decidedly less supportive sector of the population that has increasingly turned to Republicans in recent elections: the white working-class. In each of the four states that Sanders visited—Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina—President Obama received less than 20 percent of the white vote in 2012.

“All over this country, but maybe most noticeably right here in the South, you have white working class people voting against their own best interests,” he told the crowd at the CWA hall in Atlanta. “This country is facing some enormous problems, and we can’t address those problems for working people if the South keeps sending us members of the House and Senate who are continually voting against the interests of a vast majority of the American people.”

In his speeches, Sanders charged conservatives with using social issues like gay marriage, abortion and gun rights to distract voters from the economic trends devastating the vast majority of people—growing inequality and poverty, wage suppression, threats to social insurance programs, corporate-friendly trade deals, the growing costs of higher education, and inadequate and expensive health care coverage (Sanders supports the Affordable Care Act, but remains an advocate for universal single-payer health care).

“What you don’t want to do, because you disagree on one issue, is to vote for somebody who’s working against you on 10 different issues,” Sanders told the crowd gathered in an auditorium at the University of Alabama at Birmingham to loud applause. “Where we have got to come together is to not allow race to divide us, not allow gender to divide us, not allow any of these other issues to divide us.”

While he reserved his harshest criticisms for Republicans, a party of “extremists,” Sanders didn’t apologize for the Democrats. In his reading, the Democrats have become more and more reliant on corporate money and correspondingly have prioritized social issues at the expense of a progressive economic agenda. It’s not that Sanders disagrees with most Democrats on social issues—he’s been pro-choice for the entirety of his more than 30-year political career and proudly points out that Vermont was the first state in the nation to allow civil unions for same-sex couples.

But he argued that the rightward drift of the party on matters of income and wealth distribution along with its declining defense of social welfare programs has left working class voters deeply disillusioned and with nowhere to go.

“By and large, it would be hard to say that most Americans believe the Democratic Party is the party of working Americans,” Sanders told the crowd in Birmingham. “Both political parties are heavily influenced by big money and I think that people are in trouble and they don’t see anybody speaking up for them and the answer is they don’t vote or they vote on some tangential issues.”

But if candidates for office can put an egalitarian economic agenda front and center, Sanders is convinced they have a future in the South. They just might also get his blessing and some financial assistance.

Presidential ambitions or lefty pipe dream?

One couldn’t help but notice the vaguely presidential tinge of the whole affair—the wide-reaching stump speeches delivered in unfamiliar territory coupled with the fact that Sanders was greeted with a rock star reception that few other senators are capable of generating—let alone in the immediate aftermath of a government shutdown that left an already deeply unpopular Congress with its lowest approval ratings in the history of polling.

I asked the Senator if he was contemplating a presidential run in 2016. Some left-wing Democrats urged him to challenge Obama in the primary last election, and there’s once again talk of him mounting a campaign—like last time, all of it speculative. He says he doesn’t want to.

“I suppose if you’re running for president, probably going to Mississippi and Alabama is not the place most candidates would go. You go to Iowa and New Hampshire or something like that,” Sanders says with a laugh. “But what I do think is there needs to be a progressive voice in the presidential process. I hope very much there will be a voice coming up to do that.”

But when pressed to say if he’s completely decided against running, he acknowledges he hasn’t. “I haven’t ruled it out.”