After Bernie's marvelous address to students at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he tried to find common ground with the religious right on issues like poverty, income inequality, and healthcare, something seems to have changed. Earlier this week on MSNBC's "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell," guest host Ari Melber had one of the more honest political dialogues I've seen in this cycle with Vox Media's Editor-in-Chief, Ezra Klein. To be sure, Bernie faces lots of hurdles, but Klein was very impressed with what's been achieved in a relatively short period of time.

Klein is neither a partisan hack, nor does he have a political axe to grind. By any measure, he is one of the brightest young journalists, political analysts, and writers around - dispassionate, thoughtful, and rational. I have been reading him for years ever since he was an associate editor for the The American Prospect.

Here's part of the exchange between Melber and Klein. The video was embedded as part of a Tweet from Melber and I have transcribed the relevant portion of the conversation. I encourage you to watch the entire video.

Every political surge is not created equal. Here's why @BernieSanders and @realDonaldTrump are so different. http://t.co/...

Click This Link to Watch the MSNBC Video As I Could Not Embed it. If you are an expert on embedding videos from MSNBC, I could use your help. There wasn't a problem with doing so until a few months ago.

Ari Melber: The outsiders are surging when you look at the HuffPost polling trend. Trump has over 33 points leading the field. When you look at the same trend for Democrats, Sanders is near 50% in New Hampshire. He does trail Clinton nationally and that may sound like a similar dynamic in both the parties. And you may have had people comparing Trump and Sanders. But there is a lot of evidence that Sanders's surge is far more significant than Trump's because he began the race unknown to most voters, because he doesn't have billions of dollars of his own money to spend, and because Sanders is surging against a single, establishment quasi-incumbent favorite in his party, not just pulling ahead in a divided, fractured field of fifteen. And that's why some political experts are starting to point out that Trump's loud, unusual campaign has actually distracted from the bigger story. Our own Chuck Todd said this on Sunday, "Still, as I've been saying for a while, if it weren't for Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders would be the biggest political story of the year."

Melber refers to and quotes an excerpt from an article that Klein recently wrote. Then, he introduces the panel, including Klein.

Ari Melber: Ezra, what do you mean by that and what is special about what Bernie Sanders is doing?

Ezra Klein: So, Sanders is mounting an insurgent candidacy and he is now ahead in some polls in Iowa and way ahead in New Hampshire. And he's doing it without... he's really in a way the anti-Trump. He comes in with virtually no name recognition in the national Democratic Party. He comes in with no money. He doesn't get the wall-to-wall media coverage that Trump gets, not even a shadow of that. He doesn't make the kinds of provocations that Trump does, he's not doing the same kinds of stunts, he's not getting the attention for the terrible things he says about certain groups of people and he's not even going into negative campaigning. He promised early on that he not do negative campaigning and so far, he really hasn't. And yet, week by week, month by month, he is gaining in very serious ways on Hillary Clinton. That's a tremendous kind of victory and it's worth noting too that he's doing it without an issue that is splitting the Democratic Party. This isn't like when Howard Dean and later, Barack Obama used the Iraq War where there was a tremendous fissure in the Democratic Party to vault ahead of more establishment candidates. Sanders is doing it on a kind of pure approach to politics. It's a small money donor kind of democracy. That's a tremendous political accomplishment and I don't think we are quite able to recognize the magnitude of it yet because we are so distracted by Trump.