Days before New York’s presidential primary, Hillary Clinton remains a strong favorite to win the Democratic Party’s nomination. She’s won more votes and more delegates than her only opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders, and stands poised to defeat him soundly in New York as well. At the same time, though, Sanders is gaining on Clinton in national polls, and has trounced Clinton in many recent small-state contests. He’s apparently decided not that he’s destined to lose, but that, to win, he must depart from the uplifting strategy he used to introduce himself to voters, and adopt an unsparing one, giving Clinton no quarter on just about any issue.

Over the course of two hours Thursday night, Sanders was merciless and at times contemptuous toward Clinton (who, as is her custom, gave as good as she got). Sanders practically mocked Clinton’s suggestion that the money she’s received (in pay and donations) from unsavory interests hasn’t corrupted her agenda. He criticized Clinton for deploying a “racist term”—“superpredator”—during the debate over her husband’s crime bill. Where they parted ways on issues, he attributed it to her establishmentarianism. Where they agreed, he mocked her as a Johnny Come Lately.

Clinton and her supporters are clearly and understandably exasperated with Sanders’ debating tactics, but they ought to appreciate the fact that he rarely equivocates.

And yet, the ninth Democratic primary debate revealed almost no new daylight between Clinton and Sanders. It mainly just revealed that Sanders won’t go quietly into the night. Sanders was withering in his criticisms, but the criticisms were almost all familiar. Occam’s razor suggests his strategy is intended to avoid a blowout defeat in New York’s presidential primary on Tuesday, which would probably constitute a fatal blow to his candidacy.

And yet despite the campaign’s bitter turn, despite the fact that Sanders’s Hail Mary tack is much more likely to damage Clinton in the general election than to secure the nomination for himself, supporters should maintain a fondness for him as a fundamentally decent rival who has left Clinton, the Democratic Party, and the country better off. At the stage where all kindness has drained out of a campaign, most candidates find themselves tempted to sacrifice their remaining integrity to win. Sanders, by contrast, reminded skeptics why his supporters have been so loyal: With everything on the line, given the opportunity to obfuscate at Clinton’s expense, Sanders held firm even to views that promise to damage him in the state that could seal his fate.



Consider that in the same acrimonious debate, with the New York primary on the line, Sanders criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s brutal military incursions into Palestinian territory, and called for Israel and the world to treat Palestinians with dignity and respect.

