Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency for the new Spectator USA website.

I'm joined today by John Rick MacArthur, who is the president of Harper's magazine, and I think it's fair to say

a big Bernie Sanders fan, and we're going to be asking, can Bernie Sanders win? Now, Rick, we've had

the news that Bernie Sanders is going to run in 2020. I thought, not that I'm any big expert on this,

but I thought all along that he would run,

and I thought there was this strange sort of unwillingness among democratic pundits to acknowledge that he was going to run,

and that if he did choose to run, that he would be the overwhelming favorite, because it seems to me he should be the favorite if you look at it.

What do you think?

Well, yes, the reluctance is not reluctance.

It's hostility.

I think there's a tremendous amount of hostility towards Sanders from, for one of a better

word, the mainstream press.

And by the mainstream press, word, the mainstream press.

And it's, it's the, by the mainstream press, I mean the Washington Post, the New York Times,

the Wall Street Journal, and I guess you'd include certain networks like MSNBC and the main network, CBS, ABC, NBC, because he is absolutely inflexible in his reform-mindedness.

The way he talks, I just watched the entire conversation he had on CBS this morning, where he made his

announcement that he was running in an interview.

And there is a kind of,

I suppose, honorable, but also annoying rigidity about him in his insistence on reform. In other words,

he just cuts them no slack. So that when the people inside the Beltway ask him a question, say, well, don't you think that Medicare for all is a bit much to swallow?

He goes, well, I mean, we had Medicare in 1964 when it was introduced.

We managed.

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