MADISON, WISCONSIN—Give the Bernie Sanders campaign some credit for learning on the fly. It used to be that they'd open up their events about four hours before they were scheduled to begin and the attendees would sit around until the speechifying portion of the program broke out. On Sunday night, however, the campaign brought an entire medicine show into the Kohl Center on the campus of the University of Wisconsin. There were two rock and roll bands, two actresses, and even the Solidarity Singers, the people who show up at the capitol five days a week to sing. Rosario Dawson and Shailene Woodley helped keep the people in the seats. (Dawson's silliness about the president aside—I've lived through at least two failed presidencies; this ain't one of them—she has become quite an effective surrogate.) So when Sanders finally took the stage, the 4,400-odd people who showed up for the rally were thoroughly entertained and, therefore, engaged.

Sanders came to Madison in an odd place. On Sunday, The New York Times ran a story that was a curious sort of pre-mortem post-mortem. Sanders campaign officials spoke on the record about how they should have done more in 2015 to be more successful in 2016. This is the kind of story that appears after a campaign is over and all that's left is the bitter recriminations, most of them anonymous.

"Would I have wanted him on the road like 24/7? Yeah, of course," said Jeff Weaver, Mr. Sanders's campaign manager, who noted that candidate visits were more powerful with voters than television advertisements or pro-Sanders surrogates. Referring to Mr. Sanders's work as a senator, Mr. Weaver added, "He does have this other responsibility which he takes very seriously, and I certainly understand that." Ms. Sanders, an influential adviser to her husband, suggested that he might be in a better position today if he had campaigned more in 2015. "We didn't run all over the nation last year," Ms. Sanders said. "We spent every week in the Senate; and every weekend, three or four days a week, he would be running around the country." "It's something that gives you pause," she added.

I love liberal Democrats. I truly do. If this were a Republican campaign, even a burlesque failed Republican campaign similar to the 14 failed Republican campaigns we saw this year, you'd have to use the rack to get quotes like this out of staffers, and then you'd have to promise to give them pseudonyms and fly them to Aruba. Instead, you have the candidate's wife, on the record, wondering if her husband spent too much time at his day job at the expense of his candidacy. Ye gods.

(That said, why the Times needed to seek out Bob Kerrey, one of the worst presidential candidates I've ever seen, to allow him again to take out for a walk his decades-old grudge against the Clintons is quite beyond me. Unsurprisingly, Kerrey thinks Sanders should have been hammering HRC over the e-mails and the Wall Street speeches harder than he did for longer than he has. This would have ended the Sanders campaign some time in February.)

At the same time, Sanders has a small but durable lead here, and he's still raising great gobs of money. Hillary Rodham Clinton seems increasingly dismayed that she still has to campaign against anyone, and Sanders has set up housekeeping on her last nerve. But a great deal of the campaign depends on what happens Tuesday night here, which is why Sanders came on stage Sunday night attempting to localize a national election, rather than the other way around.

Here in Wisconsin, the easiest way to define a Bernie Sanders presidency would be to tell you it would pretty much the opposite of a Scott Walker administration.

Sanders slammed Walker for the voter ID law he rammed through his pet legislature. He plugged the candidacy of progressive Joanne Kloppenberg for the state supreme court; Kloppenberg is running against Rebecca Bradley, a Walker protégé who's riding on a tidal wave of dark money. (HRC gave Bradley quite a hiding herself at a Milwaukee dinner.) Bradley's election would solidify a Walker-friendly conservative court, possibly for the next decade. Ever since 2011, Wisconsin's politics have been nationalized as Walker used the state as a lab rat for corporate conservative political experimentation. Now HRC, Sanders, and even Donald Trump are here taking swipes at what he's done while Walker himself rides the trail with Ted Cruz, probably wishing on a star every night that his loyalty will put him on the ticket in Cleveland.

Sanders himself sounded just a bit wan on Sunday night. He was most animated during the portion of his address that was Wisconsin-specific. The rest of his standard stump speech was a bit watery and wandering. He sounded very much like a candidate on whom this whole grotesquely extended exercise has become exhausting. He was clearly energized simply through the expedience of having something different to talk about, some new injustices and inequities against which to rail. It is to the benefit of his campaign that America is a target-rich environment in that regard. As for the rest of us, particularly the rest of us who live in this state, the benefits are much harder to discern.

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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