Obama endorses “Medicare for all” and gives a special nod to Elizabeth Warren’s ideas.

Speaking to an audience largely made up of students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, former President Barack Obama spoke approvingly of the aggressively reformist agenda being put forward by Democratic candidates.

“So Democrats aren’t just running on good old ideas like a higher minimum wage, they’re running on good new ideas like Medicare for all, giving workers seats on corporate boards, reversing the most egregious corporate tax cuts to make sure college students graduate,” Obama said. He went on to praise “good new ideas like barring lobbyists from getting paid by foreign governments.”

Obama had supported universal health care before he was president, but this is the first time he’s aligned himself with the new “Medicare for all” push originally championed by Bernie Sanders. Also noteworthy is that two of the “good new ideas” Obama praises (workers sitting on corporate boards and the ban on foreign governments paying lobbyists) are signature issues of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.