People cheer as Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a political rally in Madison on Wednesday, July 1, 2015. (Wisconsin State Journal via AP)

WASHINGTON: A grandfatherly 73-year old socialist has begin to draw large crowds in his run for the White House in 2016, electrifying the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party, whose nomination as the party candidate appeared to be a shoo-in Hillary Clinton.It's early days yet, but the kind of crowds that have flocked to hear Bernie Sanders, a self-declared socialist from Vermont who is bidding for the Democratic nomination (although he is technically an independent) has piqued a media that is now wary of outliers ever since a skinny, mixed race freshman took America by storm in 2007-2008. On Wednesday, Sanders drew a crowd of 10,000 people in Madison, Wisconsin, (a record in the US for a pre-primary rally) as he sought to challenge Clinton for the party's nomination in the 2016 presidential election.Although he remains an outsider compared to establishment favorite Hillary Clinton, and is easily outgunned by her in terms of money and familiarity, the media is leery about momentum and mood swing in a country that has become increasingly tired of the same old faces, particularly since almost every election since 1980 has seen either a Bush or a Clinton in the fray. Sanders, who will be the oldest US President to take office if he is elected, would represent a remarkable change considering even the word socialist has long been anathema in the United States.On Friday, even as former Virginia Senator Jim Webb became the fifth candidate to jump into the fray for the Democratic nomination (there are 15 vying for the Republican nomination), the headlines were all about Sanders' startling progress. In a blog slugged "Scenes from an insurrection," Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote that "Sanders, running on a shoestring and a prayer, has closed to within single digits of Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire and is surging in Iowa."Actual poll numbers are less favorable. The latest survey in Iowa, a start that provides a headstart to the election campaign, shows Sanders trailing Hillary by 33 to 52 percentage points among likely Democratic participants in the state caucuses on 1 February. But beware of the mood and the momentum that political weather-vanes are detecting."Clinton, who reports raising $45 million since launching her campaign in April, will almost certainly beat the upstart 73-year-old with the crazy white hair... But Clinton and Obama are... on the wrong side of history…. the country is trending in a more liberal direction, and a growing proportion of Democrats are hardcore liberals," Milbank observed, warning that there is a "real possibility that intraparty fratricide will break out if Clinton and the rest of the Democratic establishment don't co-opt the rising populist movement" represented by Sanders.While ABC News cited Bernie Sanders an "Unlikely Source of Competition for Hillary Clinton," others argued that the national media, desperate for any kind of alternate narrative to a Hillary Clinton blow-out, was blowing Sanders' progress out of proportion.The headlines for commentaries in Salon ("Hillary Clinton is going to lose") and in the Huffington Post ("Bernie Sanders Has Overtaken Hillary Clinton In the Hearts and Minds of Democrats") were countered in The Hill which ran a take-down headlined "The Bernie Sanders Hoax" arguing that the Sanders-mania was overly optimistic.Well, so they said about a certain Barack Obama in February 2007.