Progressive radio host Thom Hartmann takes a call from a listener who wonders how a President Bernie Sanders would deal with a potentially "do nothing" Congress.

HARTMANN: I think not, because Bernie knows how to use the podium. Bernie knows how to fire people up, and this is what, in my opinion, if there's a failure to the first four years of the Obama administration, it was the failure of the president to use the bully pulpit that he had.

After noting that it was probably a mistake for President Obama to have taken the advice of many who came out of the Clinton administration who were surrounding him and who told him not to rock the boat during his first term, and who dismissed the likes of Hartmann when he had his one chance to meet with some of them, Hartmann went onto discuss whether Sanders would have a successful presidency or not were he elected.

HARTMANN: You know, there's enough populist push behind him, and this is the same thing with the first year, you need to study the first year of the FDR presidency and the best lens to look at that through is Frances Perkins. That was the woman that he made the Secretary of Labor and who invented the New Deal. [...]

But I think that that's what it is and I agree with you that we need Bernie because he represents the... he's not anti-establishment, like Chris Matthews is trying to portray him. He's not suggesting that corporations should come under the purview of government, like Chris Matthews is trying to suggest. He is really, he's an FDR Democrat. He's the FDR wing of the Democratic party. Him and Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown, and Peter DeFazio and Keith Ellison and Raúl Grijalva and Jan Shakowsky.

As Hartmann went onto discuss, most of your average voters out there know absolutely nothing about budget proposals from the Democratic wing of the Democratic party, because it's not the "institutional wing" of the party, and therefore you see very little coverage of this in the corporate media.

Would a Sanders presidency mean the end of that or not? I would like to think that it would, but our media is so corrupt that they'd fight him tooth and nail if he were actually elected.

FDR never had to put up with the existence of an entity like Fox "news" and the rest of the corporate media that's not much better.

It's nice to think that a President Bernie Sanders might be able to use public support to move these members of Congress to bend to his will and cooperate, or that President Obama might have been able to do the same if he'd spoken out more on issues that progressives and the liberal wing of the Democratic party care about.

Whether that would have ever translated into enough public support on some issues to move the GOP and their obstruction for obstruction's sake is another matter. I'd say the jury is still out and it's a question we may never get an answer to.

I'd love to see a president whack the GOP across their heads on a daily basis and explain to the public why they're doing their best to harm the working class in America and are working in support of the one percent and their rich campaign donors, and not the electorate they're actually being paid to represent.

How our corporate media would respond to that, and how much they would work to sabotage that message would be something I'd be very interested in watching to see how it played out if we ever would elect a President Sanders.