In a recent post I noted that The Hill found that Democratic Party insiders consider Bernie Sanders to be the front runner for the 2020 Democratic nomination. Today Politico is running a story saying, Bernie makes moves pointing to 2020 run. From their report (with my comments following):

Bernie Sanders is taking steps to address longstanding political shortcomings that were exposed in 2016, ahead of another possible presidential bid in 2020.

From forging closer ties to the labor movement to shoring up his once-flimsy Foreign Policy credentials, the moves have provided the senator inroads into party power structures that largely shunned him in favor of Hillary Clinton last year. They’ve also empowered the progressive icon to harness his newfound political power and help Democrats fight President Donald Trump’s administration.

Sanders has been working closely with figures who are close to the party establishment he’s long railed against, like American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. And he’s been meeting with international affairs experts such as Bill Perry, a defense secretary in the administration of President Bill Clinton, around a series of speeches designed to define his international vision, one year after running a campaign heavy on domestic policy and light on the rest of the world.

The Vermont independent hasn’t decided whether to run for president again in 2020. To his closest allies, his efforts represent a natural next step in his role as “outreach chairman” for Senate Democrats, a new position created for him late last year by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.

Yet the maneuvers could form an important part of a Sanders 2020 effort, a dozen of those allies acknowledged to POLITICO — one that looks markedly different from his surprise 2016 bid, which often suffered from a lack of mainstream political support.

“He is now in a very different position than he’s ever been in before. He’s just stepping into the role,” said senior adviser Ari Rabin-Havt, insisting Sanders doesn’t see the changes as prep for 2020. “Let’s be clear: He’s in charge of outreach for the caucus. So when people say he’s doing a better job of reaching out? Well, yeah, he’s doing his job. This is a new phase of his career.”

…In contrast to the run-up to 2016, the group of counselors also now includes pollster Ben Tulchin, who joined that year’s campaign only after Sanders was convinced that hiring a pollster was worth it. A pair of senior advisers in Sanders’ Senate office have also joined. Rabin-Havt, a former Harry Reid aide, has been directing political outreach, and Matt Duss, former president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, is working on foreign policy.

Recognizing the senator’s post-campaign national platform and 99 percent name ID across the country — and aware that his status as a potential 2020 front-runner draws further eyeballs — his team has stopped sticking to just a few pet issues. Now it tries to inject him into as many productive national conversations as possible, sometimes with the support of his wife’s new Sanders Institute think tank…

After resisting advisers’ pleas to give more foreign policy-oriented speeches during his campaign, Sanders has also now been working with Duss to build a public record on international affairs. That work has entailed more than just his trio of major public speeches on the topic this year — a February address to J Street on Trump, Israel and anti-Semitism; a speech on authoritarianism, in June, at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and a September talk at Missouri’s Westminster College to stress the importance of partnerships “not just between governments, but between peoples.”

While it certainly does not hurt for Bernie Sanders to shore up his Foreign Policy Credentials, they are hardly flimsy compared to most other recent presidential candidates. He is far more experienced at pretty much anything in government than Barack Obama or Donald Trump was. While on paper Hillary Clinton appears to have stronger credentials, it is worth noting that Sanders has been right far more often than Clinton on the major foreign policy decisions of the past couple of decades. I do hope that he will spend much more time offering a change in our foreign policy than he did during the 2016 campaign.