YMany in the pundit class claim to be confused about Bernie Sanders’s big socialism speech. For one thing, what was Franklin Roosevelt doing in it?

“There’s something a little strange about saying ‘I meant socialism like the kind advocated by the guy who very explicitly and intentionally did not call his project socialism,’” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes said on Twitter, referring to FDR. Slate’s Jordan Weissmann expressed the same thought on his website’s What Next podcast. “Bernie now wants to talk about democratic socialism as the continuation of FDR’s legacy. And it’s kind of weird rhetorically. He’s sort of latched on to this identity as a socialist even as he’s just sort of a New Deal liberal.”

More sympathetic observers saw political logic in the move, even as they agreed it made no sense on a factual level. Jamelle Bouie, in a perceptive column for the New York Times, wondered why Sanders would attempt to — in Bouie’s words — “defend himself as a ‘democratic socialist’ by defining ‘democratic socialism’ as something that is not actually socialism.” He concluded that the Vermont senator, having spent so much of his life in socialist circles, is simply trying to “bring the term itself into the mainstream of American politics.”