Democrats don't need "A Better Deal." They need Bernie Sanders.

Well, there is one Democrat with national ambitions who ran for office without rehearsing center-left cliches. And he did astonishingly well against a candidate strongly favored by the same party establishment that’s spent the past six months drafting the ideas that made up Schumer’s op-ed.

This Democrat, of course, was Bernie Sanders.

That he was an independent who became a Democrat solely for the purpose of running for president and spent a good deal of time on the stump railing against the party’s choice to succeed Barack Obama as president is just one reason why he should be treated as the party’s de facto leader and its presumptive presidential frontrunner — and why he should have been the one to craft and deliver the party’s message heading into the midterms.