Bernie Sanders Replaces Elizabeth Warren as Hillary Alternative

Incensed that Republicans want to abolish Obamacare and that the “billionaire class wants more and more for themselves and less for working families,”  socialist U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont barnstormed the Bay Area with a spate of speeches and interviews signaling a possible 2016 presidential run.

“If you go to almost any state in this country, including the most conservative, and you ask them if it makes sense to give tax breaks to billionaires while making cuts to Medicare and Medicaid and education, they will say ‘no,'” Sanders said on Monday in San Francisco.

Sanders made his case for big government recently in Los Angeles as well, and heads to Austin, Texas and Chicago later this week to deliver more speeches on what he considers to be “the obscene levels of income and wealth inequality.”

Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, observed “Bernie Sanders is actually doing what Elizabeth Warren supporters had hoped she would do, which is inject some progressive debate into the Democratic nominating process, and potentially help make Hillary Clinton talk about these issues.”

Sanders is the Senate Budget Committee’s ranking member, caucuses with the Democrats, and is the longest-serving independent in congressional history, reported the Contra Costa Times. The seventy-three-year-old native New Yorker was elected to the House in 1991 and to the Senate in 2007.

Sanders told the Los Angeles Times earlier in the month that Americans suffer from a pretty low political consciousness. Sounding a lot like another politician who ran for president in 2008 and 2012, Sanders said that the United States of America needs to go through some “fundamental changes…  in terms of income inequality, in terms of low wages, in terms of disastrous trade policies, in terms of being the only major country not to have a national healthcare program.”

The feisty Sanders said in his speech on Monday that “ when people see government doing something for them, I think they’re going to come out and vote.” He added, “If I run, I will run to win.”