Michael Bennet is a 54-year old Democrat from Colorado who was elected to his second full term in the U.S. Senate in 2016. He's deeply disturbed by the demise of the Senate, but he told me he doesn't think the Senate can be fixed from the inside. He said running for president may be one way to try to reverse the decline of American political institutions. "There is not a substitute toward trying to ... build pluralistic constituencies that will support the kind of change that we need to make ... You need to engage people in their living rooms to do that and maybe people running for president can engage people to do that. I think you can do it when you're in the Senate as well ... You need to be willing not to believe that you always have a monopoly on wisdom."

The New Yorker profile of Bennet from 2007 is here.

A 2010 profile of Bennet in the Denver Post is here.

And here's a 2009 Rocky Mountain News profile.

Outro music: "Sucker MC's" by Run DMC

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