Pelosi welcomes Sanders to 2016 race

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday welcomed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to the 2016 White House race, saying the liberal challenge to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will “enliven the debate.”

Pelosi has long-supported Clinton’s presidential aspirations, promoting her extensive public service and the historic opportunity for the country to elect its first female president. But she also suggested Sanders’s bid, giving voters an alternative, would improve the process and ultimately bolster the Democrats’ chances at the polls. 

{mosads}“It’s healthy for a party to have an exchange of ideas, to have a bench,” Pelosi said during a press briefing in the Capitol. “I don’t think that anybody who’s running for president should fear having someone else run for president, so [voters] can engage in the marketplace of ideas, which is what an election is all about.”

Clinton, who spent the last two years setting the stage for her presidential run, finally announced her bid earlier this month. Sanders, a liberal firebrand, threw his hat into the ring on Thursday morning, vowing to fight for the working class and battle historic income and wealth disparities that have grown only more pronounced in the wake of the Great Recession.

“It’s not just that, for 40 years, the middle class has been disappearing,” he said. “It’s that 99 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent, and the grotesque level of wealth and income inequality today is worse than at any time since the late 1920s.

“The people at the top are grabbing all the new wealth and income for themselves,” he added, “and the rest of America is being squeezed and left behind.”

Pelosi declined to weigh in on the question of whether the Democrats should have official primary debates. 

“It’s very healthy to have … a debate of ideas,” she said. “A formal debate? That’s not up to me.”