ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA—We served Pete Buttigieg the straight poitin here in the shebeen—straight, no chaser. We were not fans of his message or of his delivery of it. We did not think the man or the message were adequate to the very real peril facing the country. We thought his confidence too often slopped over into hubris, his message into condescension. We watched in something akin to awe as he and Amy Klobuchar developed the kind of open personal dislike that is rare in a business so dependent on artificial comity.

Nonetheless, the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination will be a lesser business without him. The fact that an openly gay man—and his husband—built a more-than-credible presidential candidacy, and that it was considered to be a very ordinary thing to do, says a great deal about Buttigieg’s character, and about how far we’ve come over the past two decades. (In 2008, only 12 years ago, Barack Obama ran for president and said that he didn’t think that Pete and Chasden Buttigieg should be allowed to marry.) It made a very quiet kind of history.

And, as it shoves us ever closer to a nominating contest between two septuagenarian white male loudmouths—and a third white male septuagenarian loudmouth’s wallet—it is a depressing turn of events. Ever since just after El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago was inaugurated, I have covered several mass marches in Washington and elsewhere. The energy at these events was damn near palpable. Engaged young people were the primary source of the electricity that crackled in the air in those days. The 2018 midterm results, in which the House of Representatives changed hands, could be said to be legitimately derived from those marches and the level of involvement they encouraged.

And now...Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders and Michael Bloomberg’s wallet? That’s the best that the Democratic Party can do in this era?

The already diminished Democratic field has now essentially been narrowed to three. Win McNamee Getty Images

The Sanders campaign certainly has a tap into some of that energy, but the campaign guards that connection so jealously that its behavior morphs into arrogance. (This has placed Elizabeth Warren’s campaign in a very tight spot. Only recently has she begun to hit Sanders, something that, for their own political reasons, the Biden partisans wanted her to do months ago. That has brought out the worst in the Sanders irregulars, online and off. Pro Tip: SPW is not staying in the race to be Biden’s vice-presidential nominee. Stop being idiots.) Biden seems to be groping toward some kind of modus operandi with the forces that drove all those marchers. Bloomberg’s relationship to any part of the Democratic Party is purely a mercenary one. Anyone who thinks he’ll drop out purely for the good of the party fails to recognize that simple fact.

(An aside: Bloomberg’s expensive audition reel for a West Wing reboot that ran on two television networks on Sunday night was the perfect burlesque of actual politics. If Mr. Rogers had been cast as Scrooge McDuck, that’s what would have resulted.)

I’m sure there were practical political reasons for Buttigieg to drop out. He’ll pick up some cred with party leaders for future campaigns, and he’s only 38 years old. But the field is poorer for his absence, and it seems to be rolling toward a dreary consummation that doesn’t betray all that #Resistance energy so much as it channels it into something like an electric blanket: warm, comforting, and conducive to a long national nap.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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