Bernie Sanders in Portland, OR. Image from Bud Meyers' blogspot.

On Sunday, Jan. 17, two hours before the last pre-Iowa debate, Bernie Sanders released a version of his healthcare plan. Although Sanders supporters reveled in the act of undercutting one of Clinton’s two desperate lines of attack, a frank read of the Medicare-for-all plan leaves a lot to be desired. The plan hardly eliminates the vagary Clinton has decried, and the inner workings of the reform and the math behind it are all but completely opaque. This piece is not the first to say it.

But it doesn’t matter. You don’t vote for Bernie Sanders for his healthcare plan. You don’t vote for him for his plan to employ millions of jobless youths to rebuild our infrastructure or his plans to tax speculation to provide tuition free college to all. It is not that these policies are impossible, even in a flawed world. As Sanders points out nearly once per breath, lots of poorer countries have universal healthcare and free tuition at public schools. However, Sanders has a long career as a shrewd, pragmatic legislator (no small accomplishment for an Independent from a rural state), and he knows exactly how Senate and Congress work. In fact, he wants the country to know the “Horror Show that is Congress.” In 2005, the “amendment king” himself gave Matt Taibbi the grand tour of the House, letting Taibbi see him fail to pass three dearly earned amendments. Soon, he took office in the Senate and Obama settled into the White House within a few days of each other. He has been there for every government shutdown, every filibuster, and every time someone yelled “Benghazi.” Rest assured, oh pragmatists, that he is under no delusions about the likelihood of getting traction for his policy agenda as a democratic president with the current Congress.

This campaign is not about his full slate of liberal policies everyone wants. It’s about the “political revolution.” His Scandinavian pie-in-the-sky goals will come naturally, he believes, as a result of changes to ensure better representation of Americans in government. Consider this. In Sunday’s debate, in just thirty minutes, he successfully pinned the issues of opioid addiction, ballooning college tuition, Wall Street excesses, endless Middle East interventions, health insurance premiums, and climate change woes all on our incredibly corrupt way of electing people to office. If the rumors of an oil industry bailout have any truth to them, they will fit neatly into his sobering view of the American political reality. Sanders is not promising. He is recruiting. He wants to wage a fierce, pitched battle to gut Citizens United, to jam the revolving door between Congress and K Street, to smother the caustic influence of endless billions dangled in front of the people who are supposed to represent us. He is recruiting for that fight.

The institution is corrupted by money. 84% of Americans agree with this. 85% think we should fundamentally change or completely rebuild it. More than half of Congresspersons are millionaires, and the average Congressperson has the wealth of 18 average American households. Two thirds of Senators are millionaires. Conversely, only 5% of Americans are millionaires. So we have half of the House and most of the Senate reflecting the financial interests of 5% of Americans. Make money, stay in office, and make more money; this is what most of our representatives do. Can anyone frankly make a counterclaim that business as usual results in good representation of typical Americans’ interests?

Sanders is doing nothing more than reminding Americans of how the more enlightened democracies work and of the kinds of popular policy outcomes they get: longer life expectancies with no healthcare bankruptcies, more education opportunities, and bankers who go to jail when they break the law, screw up the economy, and put people out of work. This vision of fair representation of government—in which the small business owner and the CEO at an investment firm have the same voice in government—motivates his supporters. Why? Because they think that if normal lower-, middle-, and upper-class interests were all represented evenly by our government, we would have had healthcare and higher education as rights a long time ago.

So, we can pooh-pooh his admittedly half-baked healthcare “plan” all we want, but it really does not detract from the value of Sanders’ vision. His appealing case—again, one that almost every American agrees with—is in his valiant push to reform an (almost) hopelessly backward system of putting people in office, one in which 158 families provide half the finances for campaigns, and one that routinely puts corporate execs and lobbyists at the helms of the government bodies meant to regulate their industries.

Yet outlet after media outlet seems to miss that this push for reform is the key ingredient to his candidacy. David Fahrenthold lists seven policy changes Sanders is running on, but neglects to mention electoral reform. Paul Krugman too, seems unable to spot the central issue rallying Sanders’ supporters, instead digging into Sanders’ promises of the moon. At best, establishment media outlets appear not to know what to do with the fire he started. At worst they are threatened, and they are coming after him. But most of his supporters know he is not promising anything. He only promises to lead a headlong charge against a system that ignores all but a tiny fraction of its constituents. He is channeling a deep reservoir of anger at the broken system, and promising to be a leader of a reform movement that only just starts with his candidacy for president. He has routinely repeated this at his rallies, “I’m here not just to ask for your help to get me elected president. I’m asking for your help the day after the election.”

His support grows because people know he is serious about reform. Clinton just cannot credibly make the same commitment. Sanders certainly is not shy about using his grand policy goals to motivate his electorate, but his supporters know they are not promises. They know healthcare, education, and privacy as rights only come after fixing the system to empower voters to put people in office who will represent all of their interests.