Even though the immediate, in-your-face local hubbub of the frenzied 2016 electoral coverage has subsided post-New York primary, I still find myself puzzled.

In the rush to frame the race in a duel-to-the-death numbers game, the endless sea of TV political pundits and soothsayers, compelled to babble endlessly, often mindlessly in the 24/7 "news" framework, seem to have missed the point of Bernie Sanders' candidacy.

So many, for example, "pondered" if Sanders had made a great political mistake in taking time to attend the conference called by the Political Academy of Social Science in Rome, a body created by the Vatican to study from the deepest humanistic perspectives the social problems besetting the planet.

The question should have been: Why did this august body, whose raison d'être is to study — from a broad range of perspective — how best to organize human society for the good of mankind, not invite the "much more experienced" Hillary Clinton to address them on the issues of economic justice and planetary sustainability?

Why did they chose to explore the thinking of this senator from Vermont, a media-designated second fiddle player?

So many now obsess on the legitimacy of Sanders' continuing the race when the numbers are against him or on his spoiler status as a Democrat and party renegade whose mission should now be to get behind the party-anointed Hillary.

The more fundamental questions all along should have been focused on what this almost career-long political independent hoped to accomplish when he set out to challenge the establishment in running as a Democrat against such a formidable opponent.

It strikes me that no matter what the results of the numbers game, all rigging and gaming and sophisticated tallying aside, Sanders' lifelong commitment to the common good as the rock bottom, non-negotiable principle of U.S. political office, the essential platform of his campaign, has won already.

Without corporate support, without entrenched party bandwagon approbation, without the panache of media worship or a former president as partner, without the misguided gender as entitlement energies of certain feminist voices, without even owning a politician's studied charm or tuxedo, Sanders, through his campaign, has managed to raise a belief not only within this country but even around the world — among serious thinkers, justice seekers, young people whose futures are at stake — that another way is possible, that " hope and change" need not be a slogan to be discarded because of the intransigence of the system, but that the system must be, can be, rethought and, when no longer viable, upended.

Sanders' voice has underscored a national hunger, evidenced in the campaign's unpredictable, resonating success. Many want desperately to believe that transformative, "out of the box" thinking can, and must, give lie and boot to the status quo.

Both parties have become too comfortable, too party to the travesties of politics as usual: corporate control and dominance, change through the incrementalism of bought-and-sold, horse-traded legislation, partisan hypocrisy — all that has gridlocked and oft times corrupted our nation's recent progress.

Sanders' appeal has revealed that so many are hungry to find ways to unleash the nation's true power — not the power of the mindless, "America uber alles" bully, the destructive force of a militant, materialistic, xenophobic nation, but of a nation eager to explore how to use its good fortune, its abundant resources and the unlimited, mindful creative energies of its people, the endless potential of its youth once given opportunity and its rich diversity to tackle the seemingly intransigent problems of poverty and pollution, war and greed. A nation that is, in other words, married to the principle "of the people, by the people, for the people."

The talking heads echo the Clinton campaign's complaint that Sanders cannot precisely detail how he will realize his vision. But isn't it better not to pretend to promises which cannot be kept but to promise that all policy will be rooted in an unwavering, bedrock determination that a moral economy is not only possible but absolutely attainable? And to point out that constant call to war and militarism of an entrenched congressional/ military/industrial complex can be ignored when it is a path to human and, ultimately, national economic destruction?

Another essential aspect of the Sanders campaign that analysts seem to miss is that the candidate has made this race about "we," the body politic. Sanders' creative, out-of-the-box campaign is a shared, creative experience that has engendered in the political arena a sense of joy, transcendence and infinite possibilities, and with it a call to communal engagement as essential to a national revolution.

In a race punctuated by much ugliness of sentiment and vision and quite a bit of buffoonery, and a political era hamstrung by gridlock, this has been a remarkable victory.