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I'm going out on a limb here, but Bernie Sanders is not going to be our next president. Still, the independent socialist senator from Vermont is sounding more and more like a man who intends to defy the doubters and run. And he could play an important role in the campaign.

Sanders hasn't formally announced his candidacy; he hasn't even changed his party registration. (If he runs, it will be in the Democratic primaries.) But he's doing everything an aspiring candidate needs to do. He's traveled to Iowa and New Hampshire. He's signed up (provisionally) a high-powered campaign manager, Tad Devine, who worked on the presidential campaigns of John F. Kerry and Al Gore. He's buttonholing reporters with even more zeal than usual. And this week, he even submitted to the gentle ridicule of faux conservative Stephen Colbert to win seven minutes of national television time.

A self-described socialist! Colbert faux-sneered. Do you frighten people when you walk around the Capitol? Are they afraid you're going to take their tractor and give it to the whole village?

Hopefully we frighten the billionaire class, Sanders replied as a youthful studio audience cheered.

Get ready to hear Sanders repeat that phrase, the billionaire class, a lot. It's the core of his message, the theme that makes him passionate: his conviction that the wealthy have hijacked not only the economy, but also the political system.

There may not have been a major-party presidential candidate with so blunt a populist message on the economy since Franklin D. Roosevelt ran against economic royalists in 1936.

The biggest issue in the country is that we don't discuss the biggest issue in the country, Sanders told me in his Senate office last week.

How does it happen that today the economists tell us that 95% of all new income created in America goes to the top 1%? How does it happen that we have by far the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth, where one family, the Walton family of Wal-Mart, owns more wealth than the bottom 40% of the American people? How does that happen, and what do we do about it?

Sanders' answers on what to do come from a crisp checklist: Higher taxes on the wealthy, a much higher minimum wage, $1 trillion of new spending on roads and public transportation and European-style national health insurance (which he tries to make less foreign by calling it Medicare for all).

He's asking the right questions. The stagnation of middle class incomes in the midst of an economic recovery has become the central challenge for both political parties. Exit polls in this month's midterm elections found that 63% of all voters believe the U.S. economic system isn't fair to most Americans, but favors the wealthy.

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A Bernie Sanders candidacy could help Hillary Clinton