Let it be known that I, as much as anybody else, think it would be pretty awesome to have a female president elected in my lifetime. However, I don’t think we should elect a female president just to do it—and that’s the exact reason I think Hillary Clinton would get the democratic nomination or the presidency.

Now, I was pretty excited when I first heard Clinton’s official announcement of her bid for the presidency, but the more honestly I looked into her politics, the more I began to see she wasn’t quite the liberal queen I had hoped for. Her decision to only put forth support for same-gender marriage after announcing her presidential bid is only the tip of the iceberg as far as I’m concerned. Although she certainly fares better for my own ideals better than any republican candidate, the fact of the matter remains that due to a few specific reasons (mainly her stance on the military and the bad sense I get from her choosing to wait as long as she did to fully come out in support of the LGBT community), she would still be the lesser of two evils, so to speak. And I’m sick of having to choose between a rock and a hard place for my president.

So when I saw there was a new candidate in town, I was pretty pumped to get to know him. At first glance, Bernie Sanders is about as close to a perfect candidate for me as I think I can hope for in our current political system. Now, I fully acknowledge that there is likely something (or, more likely, several somethings) shady in Sanders’ political past, however, his track record as I’ve seen it has been surprisingly clean.

For me, some of what stands out the most, especially in comparison to Clinton, are his stances on military and higher education. Sanders has been consistently against the use of military force, and has worked to lower military spending in favor of higher education. He has consistently voted against military-minded responses–for example, he voted no in 2006 on declaring the Iraq invasion a part of the War on Terror, giving it no exit date. As for higher education, he wants to make it free to everyone and has repeatedly said it is a right, not a luxury.

Although there are some subjects Sanders isn’t 100 percent aligned with me on (his stance on gun control is a little more lax than I would like), he’s just about the closest to perfect I think I’ll ever get—at least as far as I can tell now.