It's not because I think he's a Knight on a White Steed coming to save us all from disaster.
It's not because I think he's going to raise "the most money ever raised for a presidential campaign".
It's because I believe that we are at a moment in history when a populist, people-powered presidential campaign is the only one which can win by bringing the 'never voter' cohort out of the shadows and into the voting booth in numbers large enough to snatch the reins of power from the Republicans - by voting not just a Democratic President into Office, but enough Democratic candidates into US Congress seats and Statehouse seats, too.
Looking at our last thirty or forty years, you can clearly see how the Democratic Party establishment has dragged the entire Base of the Party rightward in response to the national mood. Bill Clinton won two presidential elections by leading that charge because it was the right move at that time.
But this is NOT the early 1990s, coming down from a massive re-orientation of national mood from the explosive 1960s to the 'morning in America' revisionist history of the religious right and the era of the Reagan Democrats. Where a cautious, middle of the road third way campaign was the only way to get those conservative democratic votes.
This is the nascent 21st century, where gay Americans now legally Serve in our Armed Forces, where same-sex couples can marry in all 50 states (if not in every county in each of them yet), where Climate Change is knocking at the door and not a scary movie promising a dire future, where California is running out of potable water in the next couple of years, where the Black Lives Matter movement may finally ring in equality under law in a way envisioned in 1863 and expounded upon a century later by MLK in 1963 but has never been fully realized in These United States...
where a whole host of problems are clamoring for our attention day in and day out.
And this is the national government we currently have to fight back against all of that:
According to a Gallup Poll released in August 2014, the 113th Congress had the highest disapproval rating of any Congress since 1974, when data first started being collected: 83% of Americans surveyed said that they disapproved of the job Congress was doing, while only 13% said that they approved. President Barack Obama, whom history will note as one of our great Presidents in the category of Accomplishments, isn't even breaking 50% in favorables in polling at this point.Our government isn't working for anyone except the extremely wealthy anymore and people are fed up. The question is, how much longer are they going to be willing to just sit there and do nothing to change things?