Fearing that Bernie Sanders is likely to announce another campaign for the presidency, centrist media outlets are beginning to pore over the senator’s public statements, scouring them for any utterance that might be blown up into a gaffe.

That’s standard fare in political coverage. But in this case, they know exactly what they’re looking for, because they know what worked best last time. The jackpot is to catch Sanders saying something offhand that, isolated from context, could appear to downplay racism.

Last month, a reporter at the Daily Beast interviewed Sanders about the midterm elections. The reporter euphemistically called the Trump administration’s politics “race-oriented,” to which Sanders replied, “Why don’t we use the right word — not use the phrase ‘race-oriented.’ Why don’t we say ‘racist,’ how’s that?”