PULL OUT NOW, BERNIE. WHILE THERE IS TIME.

Summary:  As the path to nomination narrows toward a vanishing point for the bloviating blowhard Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders, he once again, as in 2016, seeks to blame everyone and everything outside his campaign for its failure. In short, Bernie Sanders is trying to fabricate a Doschstoßlegende to explain away his poor performance in the primaries, and to whip up the resentment of his redeless followers. If we needed any more evidence the Bernard Sanders and Donald Trump are, to all intents and purposes, brothers under the skin, we now have it. Those of us who have been bidin’ our time, waiting to see if we would have to feel the bern, now know that our initial inclination toward Joe Biden was the correct one. Clearly, Joe is on the verge of becoming the prohibitive favorite in this year’s Democratic primaries.

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Cathedral City, March 11, 2020 –- Bernard Sanders, the bloviating blowhard Burlington Bolshevik, took a shellacking in last night’s Super Tuesday II primaries.  The delegate numbers for Sanders were not encouraging. Joe Biden trounced him by double digits in Michigan, a state Sanders had confidently expected to win. In Mississippi, where Sanders turned his back on the African-American community, the trouncement was even more comprehensive. Biden carried the state’s Democratic primary with 81% of the vote to Sanders 14.8%.

Under the Party’s rules, Sanders’s less-than-15% finish means that he receives no delegates at all from Mississippi. Idaho, which was also expected to fall into the Sanders column instead went with Joe. Even in Washington, which as a caucus state in 2016 had delivered a massive Sanders victory, did not deliver nearly as well for the Independent Vermont Senator under its newly adopted primaries. Washington is still too close to call, but if the numbers continue to trend as they have done, Uncle Joe will come out of Washington with as many, if not more delegates than his crypto-Marxist opponent.

The Sanders campaign now stands at a less favorable position vis-à-vis Joe Biden then it stood four years ago against Hillary Clinton. After the quondam Vice President’s Miracle of the House of Brandenburg, eight days ago, the delegate math for Sanders has changed appreciably for the worse. He faces longer odds this time than he did in 2016, and he does not have Hillary Clinton to abuse.

In fact, as I observed on Facebook last night,
 

    “The path to nomination for Bernard Sanders is narrowing to endgame. Sanders has two choices:
   
    First, he can continue his war against the so-called establishment, stamping his feet and waving his arms, doing his level worst to throw the election to Trump out of spite, and encouraging his redeless followers to throw an earsplitting snit, or
   
    Second, Sanders can recognize the ineluctable logic of events and begin to make his peace with Joe Biden, and establish a unified effort to defeat Donald Trump.
   
    If Sanders takes the first option, the consequences for this country will be devastating, and the name of Bernard Sanders will become a byword for perfidy and betrayal and those who were his vociferous followers may not expect any thanks for their own betrayal.
   
    But if Sanders takes the metaphorical midnight train to Joe’s headquarters and makes his peace, and works hard to secure Joe’s election to the Presidency, then Sanders will be in a position to push for the policy choices for which he has advocated.
   
    The choice for Sanders is simple.”

Sanders’s remarks this afternoon suggest that he is preparing to take that first option, of continuing the fight, of continuing to divide the Democratic Party, and of continuing to alienate loyal Democrats who, unusually for Democrats, have decided that the salvation of the country depends upon falling in line behind Joe Biden, rather than falling in love with some other candidate.

In doing so, Sanders is continuing to live down to the stereotype of the intransigent Japanese holdout, continuing the struggle on a Pacific island long after the Shōwa Emperor’s Gyokuon-hōsō surrender order. We may expect his equally intransigent followers to launch the equivalent of banzai charges against the prohibitive favorite in a nihilistic effort to punish the American electorate for rejecting their Chosen One.

How unnecessary! How sad and utterly meaningless! Time was, in American politics of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, that it was simply understood that once the primaries were over, the losing candidate and his followers would rally to the winner. As sometimes Texas agriculture Commissioner — and Bernie Sanders supporter — Jim Hightower once put it, there comes a time in every primary where the losing candidate and his/her supporters have to take what in Texas is known as the midnight train over to the headquarters of the winter. There, it’s time to mend some fences, have a helping or two of humble pie, and make sure that your name is on the volunteer list for the victorious campaign.

Even after being defeated by Barack Obama in the 2008 primaries, Hillary Clinton loyally supported Barack, notwithstanding the existence of a small, embittered movement on the fringes of the Party calling itself PUMA: Party Unity My Ass. Hillary set her face decisively against this divisive movement, and a unified Democratic Party was able to win the elections of 2008 for the first President of color in American history.

Unfortunately, we cannot expect such graciousness from either Senator Sanders or his supporters. Speaking today, Sanders made it clear that he has no intention of withdrawing from the race, presumably until the convention. We may expect at the convention, Sanders and his followers will misbehave as badly as they did at Philadelphia in 2016, with Sanders himself pouting for the cameras, and his redeless, cargo-shorts communist followers ostentatiously walking out of the convention hall and protesting in the streets of Milwaukee.
In a protest happens, my inner law-and-order disciplinarian says the police ought to be prepared to knock heads and arrest every one of the protesters, while my inner politician  says to handle the protesters gently lest we have a repeat of the chaos that attended upon the Democratic National Convention of 1968 in Chicago, which was a gross unforced error and a gift to Republican candidate Richard Nixon.

Yet, if Chicago ‘68 was a gift to Richard Nixon, every day that Bernard Sanders stays in the Democratic primary race without dropping out is a tacit endorsement of, and gift to, Donald Trump. If the primaries continue beyond March 17 in Arizona, and if Sanders insists on taking the process all the way to the convention, the Democratic Party will sustain significant damage. If a damaged Democratic Party loses this election to Donald Trump, we will have a justified Doschstoßlegende against Bernard Sanders and his followers.

If we lose in November, Sanders’s will be the face of perfidy and betrayal, and his followers will suffer the consequences both within the Democratic Party and among Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden loyalists. Even in California, you can be fired on account of your politics.

For in the end, politics is about the art of the possible. In the movie version of Robert Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra is a scene in which Tsar Nicholas II is discussing the military situation in the Far East with his cousin, grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich, who is trying to explain to the headstrong sovereign the obstacles Russia faced trying to fight a war 8000 miles away. 

Taking a cigarette from its case and using it as a prop, Nikolai Nikolayevich brandishes it before the Tsar.

  “This is a bullet, .... I send it off to war. How does it get there? On a single spur of railroad track four thousand miles long. And in the middle, no track at all. God help us, it spends three days packed on sleds. This works the same way for every pair of boots, first aid kit, or pound of tea we send. Get out now, Nicky. While there is time.” 

Unfortunately, as history reminds us, the Emperor did not take his cousin’s advice. Determined to fight on, Nicholas led Russia into the humiliating defeat of the Russo-Japanese war. Had Nicholas heeded his cousin’s advice, or as some time Vermont (oh, the irony!) Senator George Aiken once put it, if he had “declared victory and pulled out,” a democratized Romanov Dynasty might still be on the Russian throne today. 

But Bernie, like Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, is utterly convinced of his own rectitude, ideologically incapable of compromise, convinced, as Ilyich was convinced, that all differences of opinion are irreconcilable and that anyone who differs is either suffering from a gross moral defect or some kind of physical or mental ailment.

Another bit of dialogue from the screenplay of Nicholas and Alexandra aptly encapsulates Sanders’s position, as well as the ideological defects of the so-called “democratic socialist” left:     

“Lenin thinks freedom is something you write on a wall but you do not actually practice. I do not understand you. You hate anyone who is not your kind of Bolshevik more than you hate the Tsar. No wonder why they call you Robespierre. Everybody has got to think like you are they are out!”

In short, Bernard Sanders, whose ancestry links him ineluctably with the Russian Empire, has managed to combine in his own proper person the stubbornness of Nicholas Romanov and the ideological inflexibility of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Needless to say, this is a thoroughly bad – nay, disqualifying-- combination for someone who wants to be president of the United States. 

The time has come.

Pull out now, Bernie. While there is time.

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand, Esq. Is a dyspeptic, but loyal, Democrat. He lives in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the city Council, and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage.  The views expressed herein are his own.