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It’s in the realm of policy, however, where I find Bernie intellectually quite dishonest, and Hillary pretty damned honest. When you scrutinize his policy ideas, as wonky liberals have begun doing (finally) in the last couple of months, those ideas don’t stand up, on a bunch of different levels.

One of those levels is political—as in there’s no way, in the foreseeable future, there will be sixty votes in the Senate, much less support in a likely GOP-controlled House, to pass single-payer health care, or break up the big banks, or reform the political campaign system, or provide free college tuition for every student.

Even if you could somehow get them passed, practically they either wouldn’t work or would be recklessly disruptive or both.

On the billionaire class, it’s not just that America has never, since its founding, been able to keep money out of political campaigns (though the problem has clearly gotten much worse in recent years). It’s that campaign donations are not remotely the most important way billionaires and corporations rig the system to their benefit. Rather, it’s through the money that flows into the Washington lobbying machine, and Bernie’s campaign finance reforms won’t do squat about that.

many big ideas (single-payer, free college) would be insanely costly and be coming at a time when federal deficits will start climbing because of the retirement of the Baby Boomers. Hillary’s many proposals will also hit that rising deficit wall, but hers aren’t anywhere near as costly as Bernie’s.

It drives me crazy that so many people buy into the idea that Bernie’s policies are the principled ones and that other people’s more “pragmatic” policies are compromised, watered down, and, ultimately, something to be ashamed of. I don’t see it that way at all. To me, selling policies that you know or should know won’t work is pretty much the definition of unprincipled.

Bernie has had thirty-five years in Congress to get involved in and bone up on issues of national security and foreign policy. He’s chosen not to, while Hillary spent four years as secretary of state.

Of course, most people don’t have the time or inclination to learn the nuances of complicated policy questions. If you’re a young person who leans left, you’re probably engaged in a simpler thought process: establishment politics has left me with high student debts and diminished job prospects; Hillary Clinton is the ultimate example of establishment politics; Bernie Sanders has fought establishment politics for years on behalf of progressive goals I believe in; why the hell shouldn’t I vote for Bernie?

I get it. The simplest response I can offer is this: on policy, Bernie doesn’t know what he’s talking about; the policies that most damaged your life came overwhelmingly from the Republicans, not the Democrats; and the Democrat most likely to beat the Republican in November is not Bernie Sanders.

"The only reason that I had any hope in launching a long-shot campaign for Congress is because Bernie Sanders proved that you can run a grassroots campaign and win in an America where we almost thought it was impossible," Ocasio-Cortez said. 

"It wasn't until I heard of a man by the name of Bernie Sanders that I began to question and assert and recognize my inherent value as a human being that deserves health care, housing, education and a living wage," she said. 

Ocasio-Cortez credited Sanders for what she described as one of the best Democratic presidential primary fields in a generation and touted his influence on the freshman Democratic congressional class.

Ocasio-Cortez told CBS News on Saturday endorsing Sanders was "the most authentic decision to let people know how I feel and where I am," and said it was not based on a political calculation.

The former president, addressing a few hundred supporters at a junior high school here, portrayed his wife’s opponent for the Democratic nomination as hypocritical, “hermetically sealed” and dishonest.

“ ‘Anybody that doesn’t agree with me is a tool of the establishment,’ ” Mr. Clinton said, mocking what he described as the central critique of Mrs. Clinton by Mr. Sanders.

“Is it good for America? I don’t think so. Is it good for New Hampshire? I don’t think so.”

“The New Hampshire I knew would not have voted for me if I had done that.”

She and other people who have gone online to defend Hillary, to explain why they supported her, have been subject to vicious trolling and attacks that are literally too profane often, not to mention sexist, to repeat.”

“Bernie took what they said was good about him and put it in his own endorsements,” said Mr. Clinton, fuming that Mr. Sanders used complimentary language from a Nashua Telegraph endorsement of Mrs. Clinton in his own campaign appeals.

After the two then parted, Steyer -- who had been standing behind them and looking alternately at each of them -- can be heard saying, "I don't want to get in the middle. I just want to say hi, Bernie."

The tension between the two top-tier candidates has been simmering since earlier this week. In a CNN story published Monday, four sources said Sanders had told Warren during a private 2018 meeting about the 2020 campaign that a woman could not win.

"I really wasn't listening. They were talking about getting together or something," Steyer said. "I really didn't listen. I really -- it was one of those awkward moments where I felt like, you know, I need to move on as fast as possible."

He added, "My goal was simply to say good night to two people who I respect. The last thing I wanted to do was get between the two of them and listen in. That was not my goal and I didn't do it."

The Bernie-or-Bust-ers tend to be young, male, and white; few describe themselves as Democrats, and many are new to voting. Women, people of color, and Democrats seem more open to Clinton.

They’re both challenging the system. We are people who don’t believe in the system! We want to make a new system where people take care of each other.”

The Sanders movement has become impervious to reality. Some have even called into question the nature of reality itself: “Bernie Sanders’ ‘political revolution’ is political only inasmuch as thought is political,” a self-described “metamodernist creative writer”

A spate of recent polls have shown Clinton tied with or slightly trailing Trump in November matchups, the apparent effect of a Republican Party that has unified and a Democratic Party that remains fractured.

Sanders has repeatedly said he will not play the spoiler—by running as an independent or backing a third-party candidate such as Stein. He says he will do everything in his power to defeat Trump.

Many Sanders supporters told me they had once liked Clinton, but over the course of the primary they have come to dislike and distrust her.

It seems fitting that this potentially final battle royale should take place in California, a big, liberal state populated by all the various Democratic tribes: the kombucha-sipping hipsters of San Francisco; the techno-utopians of Silicon Valley; the limousine liberals of Hollywood; the large black and Latino populations.

A poll of the state conducted earlier this month gave Clinton an 18-point lead over Sanders, but in a new poll released Thursday, that had narrowed to just two points.

This week, he was given five slots on the Democratic platform committee, which will allow him to influence what the party stands for—presumably an important goal.

“I was very loving toward Bernie Sanders until about a week ago, but now he’s working to elect Trump,” said Kathy Katz, 73, of Temecula. “We’re all way more liberal than the Democratic Party, but some of us realize you can’t win an election that way!”

Clinton, for her part, has taken to pretending Sanders does not exist. In her speech, she referred only to Trump, whose candidacy, she said, “may have started out as entertaining, but now it’s really, really concerning.” She added, “We have a bully pulpit in the White House—that doesn’t mean we want a bully in the White House!”

Sanders was introduced by a blind Filipino delegate and a gay actress who spoke passionately in favor of transgender rights and compared Sanders to a unicorn, because “he seems too good to be true.”

If the labor movement’s strength is unity, its weakness is a reflexive worship of hierarchy: Locals supply the labor, and the national leadership sets the direction. That’s the way it has been for years, but it may be changing. Locals have signaled they want a bigger say in national political decisions. Until they get it in a meaningful way, divided unity will continue.

This time, by contrast, Sanders arguably talks about foreign policy more than any other declared candidate does. Of the four senators who launched their candidacies via video—Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Sanders—only his mentioned foreign policy

What distinguishes Sanders is the same quality that distinguished him on domestic policy in 2016: his willingness to cross red lines that have long defined the boundaries of acceptable opinion

He’s produced videos that call Gaza an “open-air prison,” he’s depicted Benjamin Netanyahu as part of the “growing worldwide movement toward authoritarianism,” and, most controversially of all, he’s suggested cutting U.S. military aid to Israel.

He’s the only presidential candidate in recent memory who regularly describes the Cold War not as a heroic American victory, but as a cautionary tale

Sanders doesn’t just warn against U.S. military intervention in Venezuela, as Warren and Gillibrand have. He warns against it while invoking the United States’ “long history of inappropriately intervening in Latin American countries.

he wants America to shun the quest for global supremacy that leads it to overthrow regimes it can’t control and to instead pursue a foreign policy based on “partnership, rather than dominance.”

He called for putting the United Nations—which he called “one of the most important organizations for promoting a vision of a different world”—near the heart of American foreign policy

Sanders challenged the domestic side of the exceptionalist creed: the belief that American capitalism—buttressed by modest regulations and welfare provisions—provides upward mobility.

Now Sanders is poised to challenge exceptionalism in foreign policy: the belief that America, as a uniquely virtuous nation, can substitute its own self-interest and moral intuition for international institutions and international law

A 2017 Pew Research poll found that Americans over the age of 30 were far more likely to say that the “U.S. stands above all other countries in the world” than to say, “There are other countries that are better than the U.S.” But among adults under 30, the latter view predominated by a margin of more than two to one.

For a presidential candidate, challenging American exceptionalism would, until recently, have seemed like a sure path to political oblivion

In 2020, Americans will learn whether there’s a market for his anti-imperial heresies too.

“More commonly, there is a barrage of jabs and threats sometimes framed as jokes. If the target is a woman, and it often is, these insults can veer toward her physical appearance.”

The only real analog in U.S. politics today to the Bernie nasties are the Trump nasties. They resemble each other in ways neither side cares to admit.

The most obvious resemblance is the adulation they bestow on their respective champions, whom they treat less as normal politicians than as saviors who deserve uncritical and uncompromising support.

“Surrender to a leader is not a means to an end but a fulfillment,” the philosopher Eric Hoffer observed in “The True Believer,” a book that remains as relevant in our populist era as it was in the totalitarian one. “Whither they are led is of secondary importance.”

In the demonology of most mass movements there is usually a near enemy and a far one, and the near enemy must be dealt with first and hardest

To this day, hard-core Trump supporters reserve their deepest spite for Republican NeverTrump holdouts (“human scum,” according to the president).

Just so with the Bernie Bros, who see more moderate Democrats not as kindred spirits or potential converts but as sellouts, even traitors — the proverbial enemy within

But it also goes to the heart of what the Bernie Bros are really about. As they see it, ordinary civility isn’t a virtue. It’s a ruse by which those with power manipulate and marginalize those without.

Democrats like Joe Biden who play by the rules of civility and bipartisanship aren’t just falling prey to the insidious manipulation. They are perpetrating and legitimizing it

No wonder nearly half of Sanders’s supporters won’t commit to or are unsure about voting for the Democratic nominee in the event it isn’t Bernie, according to a recent poll. Why bother voting for Oligarchy Lite?

“They will spend an enormous amount of money fighting us. They will lie about what is in the program. They will frighten the American people,” he said.

But he says the time has arrived to have a debate he believes is fundamental: is healthcare a right or a privilege in America?

Sanders will formally unveil the bill at a press conference on Wednesday, with the backing of nearly a third of the Democratic caucus in the Senate – a record level of support for a bill he introduced just four years ago with only one signature, his own.

The Sanders plan would radically reform the American healthcare system, transitioning it over the course of four years to a federally administered insurance program.

And that is true no matter what the two principals say (or don't say) about that now-famous December 2018 meeting and/or the no-handshake moment in Tuesday night's debate. What happened Tuesday night seems likely to reverberate not just through the Iowa caucuses in 19 days' time but the broader fight over who emerges as the liberal choice and whether -- or not -- the left is willing to rally around that person.

Bernie Sanders refuses to get bogged down – or pinned down – on specifics during Democratic debate

Bloomberg improves from his last debate — but is it enough?

Like his boss, the campaign manager believed that this was solely about the establishment’s determination to install a protector of the status quo. He insisted to me that Team Bernie was in fact delighted to see it come down to their boss versus Biden — “a perfect foil,” he maintained.

now the Sanders campaign was confronting the judgment of voters: Biden had a center-left coalition (including the allegiance of the party’s crucial black constituency) that seemed capable of prevailing in a general election, while the Sanders movement relied on young voters who weren’t coming out all that abundantly in February and March and therefore couldn’t be counted on to produce a record turnout in November

the gale force of the post-Super Tuesday “Stop Bernie” movement felt, to Bernie and Jane Sanders, far more brutal than it did during the previous cycle. This was not really about wanting to unseat Trump, in the Sanderses’ view. This was about shutting down Sanders’s anti-establishment critique.

In defeat, Sanders has prompted a reckoning within the Democratic Party. He has forced upon it an airing of ideological differences, compelling progressives and moderates to choose their leader and then make the case in public.

The notion that political change and electoral victory were often two different things — that the former could and did occur without the latter — has been an essential tenet of Sanders’s underdog career.

He observed that many politicians “fade away” as their losing campaigns do. This would not be Warren’s fate, he said. Then he explained why: “She has changed political consciousness in America — which, at the end of the day, is the most important thing that any candidate could do.”

"What it means is, what Cardi B does, not only is she an enormously popular entertainer, what she is doing is speaking to young people about the important issues that are on their minds and I applaud that very much" Sanders told CNN in July.

"People are not perfect, but he has the perfect intentions. He naturally cares about minorities. He actually cares about people getting Medicare because he knows they can't afford it. I don't feel like he's just saying these things 'cause he want the vote," Cardi B said.

Democratic primary voters may also wonder how effective Sanders would be as president. His pitch to his supporters is that, if he somehow were to be elected, some sort of “political revolution” would result in Congress passing multitrillion-dollar plans for a Green New Deal, a top-to-bottom transformation of the healthcare system, a federal job guarantee, free college and student debt elimination, plus other vastly ambitious and expensive plans for education, immigration, housing and so forth. These promises are unrealistic, and Sanders’ ability to get them past Congress would be approximately nil

in 2016 I got a glimpse of the Republican party’s opposition research book on Sanders, which was so massive it had to be transported on a cart. The Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald, who got to see some of its contents, declared that “it was brutal. The Republicans would have torn [Sanders] apart.”

According to Eichenwald, the book includes damning material such as the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to Texas where it would be dumped in a poor Hispanic community, that he honeymooned in the Soviet Union, and that he appeared at a 1985 rally in Nicaragua at which Sandinista supporters chanted “Here, there / the Yankee will die.” And then there’s Sanders’ fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men…

Sanders is in many ways an appealing politician whose message has resounded at a moment when both America’s economic and political systems face tremendous voter skepticism. But as a viable candidate to defeat Trump? As they say in Sanders’ Brooklyn birthplace, fuhgeddaboudit.

The voters sent a clear message that income inequality weighed on their minds, with more than one in four Democratic voters saying the issue was the most important facing the nation, according to surveys of voters leaving the polls.

Mr. Sanders’s strong performance in Iowa was a significant milestone in a campaign in which he began 40 percentage points behind Mrs. Clinton when they both declared their candidacies last spring

While she long said that Iowa would be a tight race, and improved upon her 2008 performance when she won 29.5 percent and fell to third place behind John Edwards, Mrs. Clinton nonetheless hoped that she would start exorcising the ghosts of 2008 with a victory here

Mr Trump's lead in New Hampshire is the first time the New York businessman - who has never held political office - has translated his widespread support in opinion polls into an election victory.

On Tuesday Ohio Governor John Kasich came second in the Republican vote, with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Florida Senator Marco Rubio all vying for third place.

"he wants to give away our country, folks!"

With close to 90% of the votes counted, Senator Sanders has a lead of more than 20 percentage points over Mrs Clinton in the two-horse race for the Democratic nomination.

"What the people here have said is that given the enormous crises facing our country, it is just too late for the same old, same old establishment politics and establishment economics," Mr Sanders told cheering supporters.

But Mrs. Clinton’s problems are broader than just her message: Opinion polls show that some Democrats and other voters continue to question her trustworthiness and whether she cares about their problems. Recent polls show that her once-formidable lead over Mr. Sanders in Iowa has all but vanished, while he is holding on to a slight lead over her in New Hampshire.

Mrs. Clinton and her team say they always anticipated the race would tighten, yet they were not prepared for Mr. Sanders to become so popular with young people and independents, especially women, whom Mrs. Clinton views as a key part of her base.

Several Clinton advisers are also regretting that they did not push for more debates, where Mrs. Clinton excels, to more skillfully marginalize Mr. Sanders over his Senate votes in support of the gun industry and the enormous costs and likely tax increases tied to his big-government agenda.

Instead, Mrs. Clinton, who entered the race as the prohibitive favorite, played it safe, opting for as few debates as possible, scheduled at times when viewership was likely to be low

Both Mrs. Clinton and her husband believe she can still win the Feb. 1 caucuses in Iowa and the Feb. 9 primary in New Hampshire despite Mr. Sanders’s gaining ground recently and now being virtually tied with her in many polls in those states. But the Clintons also believe she can survive losses in both places because of the strength of her political organization and support in the Feb. 27 primary in South Carolina and in many March 1 Super Tuesday states and other big states to follow.

Yet some Democratic Party officials who remain uncommitted said that after nine months of running, Mrs. Clinton still had not found her voice when it came to inspiring people and making herself broadly likable.

While Mrs. Clinton is known for connecting well with people in small settings, she has not shown the same winning touch as consistently at rallies or in television interviews, they said.

“Her voter base does not seem as gung-ho energetic as Sanders’s base,” Mr. McDonald said. “It may be that they feel like they are waiting for the real race to begin. But an enthusiastic base can make a big difference in the early stages of a presidential nomination campaign, and if Hillary can’t pull away from Sanders fairly early in the season, I suspect he will gain strength rapidly.”

“Bernie’s still being given a bit of a free pass by the national media,” he says. “I do not believe that he would be a strong candidate for our party in the fall. And, except for three months out of every four years, he’s not even of our party.”

Some such stories, he says, feature in another manuscript, written with the guidance of the late Richard Ben Cramer, the author of What It Takes, “the definitive book about the 1988 presidential race” in which Hart flew so high then fell. Its title is Baltimore: A Memoir and a piece of it is out there on the web. Some want O’Malley to rewrite it, he says, to tie his own story more closely to the idea he was the model for the mayor of Charm City played by Aidan Gillen in The Wire, David Simon’s groundbreaking HBO series. He’s not keen.

Of course, much of the energy that delivered such victories was determinedly progressive, akin to or directly supportive of Sanders and his transformative effect on the liberal cause. But O’Malley is as much a pillar of the party as Sanders is not.

e smiles. “Do you want me to speak more frankly?”

Here’s a guy who has been a kind of stalwart of the National Rifle Association, a man who said immigrants steal our jobs right up until he ran for president,

Such focus seems timely: with the federal government in Trump’s sclerotic grip, cities in particular have begun to take a lead. On climate change, for example, some US mayors have reacted to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris deal by saying they will simply pursue its aims themselves.

The Gonzaga gathering, O’Malley says, is a friendly one, a chance for the old boys “to ask, ‘Hey, how are you doing? How’s your wife? How’s your kids? What are you up to?’

“We recognized each other from the Sunday shows and having served together. We shook hands … but it was not a moment for me to simply say, ‘Hey, how’s work?’ I know how work is with him.

om Perez, once the Maryland secretary of labor, ended up in the role but O’Malley supported a young mayor from the Republican heartlands: Pete Buttigieg, now a challenger in the presidential primary.

But in an echo of the frustrations of 2016, O’Malley criticises the way the DNC has run the primary, particularly the way debate qualifications based on polling data and donor numbers – changed this week – have kept the likes of the former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick (“a friend” to whom O’Malley has donated) and the Montana governor Steve Bullock firmly out of the spotlight.

I was out there rattling the tin cup, from county square to county square.”

“All of that’s part of the process. But at the end of the day, we have to nominate someone who can defeat him and who can bring our country together and govern.”