As Dan Savage already told you, longtime member of the House and current junior senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders is running for president.

It’s largely and pessimistically held that Sanders will basically serve as an adorable B-story to Clinton’s robotic march to the oval office, one that will keep Clinton honest by steering the conversation a little more to the left than she’d like it to go. She’ll have to answer for her relationship with Wall St., for instance, and say something real about her position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But other than that, Bernie is destined to bomb.

But hold on.

Is it so crazy to be serious about electing a socialist Vermonter as president, despite the general feeling that Clinton is a shoo-in? The White House is, after all, one of the longest-running house shares in the country.

And as of this moment, conservatives are officially running Marco “The Tea Party Wants Me to Be Vice President Real Bad” Rubio, Rand “My Dad Invented the Tea Party and I Helped” Paul, and Ted “Nah Na Nah Na Boo Boo” Cruz and a prince of the Bush Dynasty.

Does the left get no viable, slightly radical candidate of its own?

Whereas Clinton is fashioning herself into some kind of iPad commercial about you, Sanders plans to run on and speak loudly about income inequality, which actually concerns you, and several different kinds of yous, too. And it's not outside the realm of possibility that conservatives and and business leaders who are worried about the wealth gap could prefer Sanders to GOP candidates who are transparently using the rhetoric of income inequality as a way of capitalizing on poor peoples’ fear.

There’s also a growing number of people who identify as lower- or working-class, the people who will most benefit from Sanders’s plans. Plus, the Pew Research Center finds that the gap between middle-income families and the upper-income families is widening, too, with upper-income families making nearly seven times more than middle-income families. These expanding, national feelings of class anxiety could be seeds for some potentially meaningful grassroots action for Sanders.

And he wants to raise minimum wage to $15/hr. And he advocates for single-payer healthcare. And he wants to address climate change. And he really, really wants to fix our crumbling infrastructure. (It’s the first issue listed on the “On the Issues” page of his website, and it has the longest and most detailed description.)

The big trouble is that people don’t really know who he is. A recent poll suggests that 64 percent of Democrats don’t know if they’d vote for him, and at this point there are more Dems who would not vote for him than who would.

But there's certainly plenty of time for liberals to get to know him. People in his home state certainly seem to like him. And in general he's basically a Brooklyn dad version of E. Warren who you'd also wanna drink a beer with. We've elected presidents for that reason before, right? I believe we have. The only difference is this one can actually speak passionately, forcefully, and intelligently about complex issues that matter.