Now he would seek the presidency — as a Democrat.

All of which makes the reasons for Sanders’s decision seem obvious. Independent campaigns for president have never won. And Sanders, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has said often that he would never be a “spoiler,” the label applied to third-party presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who was cast into political oblivion after being blamed with costing Democrat Al Gore the 2000 election.

“I have no taste for symbolic campaigns,” Sanders wrote in his 1997 political autobiography, “Outsider in the House.”

But the reasons go deeper than that.

Over his political career, Sanders has inched ever closer to the Democratic Party, with a congressional voting record more Democrat than most Democrats. At this point, he explains his democratic-socialist views by referring not to his old hero Debs but to one of the most beloved Democrats of all, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2016/02/05/his-most-radical-move/?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_evening