Bernie has three main areas to worry about as he sets out to negotiate his way out of a humiliating end to the primary fight: how the primaries operate, Hillary’s platform and his future in the Senate and Hillary’s administration. To his great misfortune he is trying to control all three and has very little real chance of succeeding. But he is also miscalculating his strengths at every turn.

Yesterday, he publicly demanded that Debbie Wasserman Schultz be replaced, that super delegates be ended, that polling be better staffed and that all primaries be open to independent or republican cross-over voters. These demands all fall within the area Bernie will have the least success in, how the primaries operate, particularly right now in this shadowy moment where he won’t concede the race or end his campaign.

Why can’t Hillary grant any of these wishes or compromise any of these points for party unity? Hillary can’t and won’t buckle on any of these issues because each of these demands play into Bernie’s conspiracy theory that the electoral system is unfair, did him wrong and robbed him of his win in this 2016 nomination fight. This list of demands is meant to delegitimize Hillary’s win and her presidency. If Bernie can get Hillary of the President or the powers-that-be in the Democratic house and senate to agree that the entire process needs rebooting and redesigning then they are also admitting that the race was unfair to Bernie and his people and that her win of the nomination is tainted. Getting rid of DWS is an admission that she had her thumb on the scale and the process was unfair to Bernie. Getting rid of the super delegates says the same thing, that super delegates make the process of choosing a nominee unfair. Letting Bernie claim that better staffing is needed at the polls feeds the same storyline, that Bernie did not have a fair chance to win and that Hillary benefitted from such bad practices. Fighting for open primaries says the exact same thing: that the process could be fairer and thus was unfair this year.

Does Bernie anticipate a win on any of these four demands? Is it a padded list of options meant to produce one big win? Ditching DWS can’t happen: she is an important congresswoman from a crucial swing state and has been one of the most outspoken surrogates of the DNC for more than a decade: ditching her would be bad for Hillary’s chances in Florida and signal an ugly willingness to dispense with anyone Bernie fingers as unfair to him. Bernie’s attack on her follows an ugly trend by his campaign of delegitimizing every powerful woman who dared speak up for Hillary (Hillary herself, DWS, Steinem, Albright, Boxer, The head of the Nevada Democratic Party and, in the pages of the Nation, writers like Joan Walsh and Katha Politt who were savagely attacked as shills whenever they wrote about the campaign).

Bernie’s demand to get rid of super delegates is a similar non-starter: it would feed the storyline that the existence of super delegates in this race was structural undemocratic and unfair to Bernie and had they not been in the process, he might have won. I see the presence of both pledged delegates and super delegates as the main reason someone like Donald Trump (or Trump himself) did not come in to the democratic race and completely usurp the machinery of our primary process to take over the party. But more importantly I see that the super delegates and pledged delegates are analogous to the senate and house of representatives, that each are there in a bi-camera setting to offset each other’s strengths and weaknesses. The super delegates are almost all chosen democratically insofar as they are mayors, reps, senators and governors chosen by voters, that being a super delegate is part of what they’ve won in their respective campaigns and elections. Yes, they arrive at different answers than the pledged delegates do sometimes, but a senator in no way is expected to vote the same way as members of the House of representatives from their same state: no one ever makes the argument that senators and reps vote the same way and the argument by bernie supporters and by Bernie himself that super delegates should in any way follow the vote of pledged delegates is comically non-sensical.

NBC’s Chuck Todd has repeatedly predicted in recent weeks that these structural details like super delegates or whether primaries are open or closed should be easy for Hillary to give away in negotiations to Bernie to close out the primary fight and gain a measure of unity in the Democratic party, but Todd is wrong. Giving up ground on any of these process issues lets bernie perpetuate the dangerous face-saving fantasy that he didn’t really lose this election, that he fought a currupt process and never had a fair shake at winning. Giving up on any of these process arguments delegitimizes Hillary’s historic win just as much as The Birther argument or Bush vs. Gore have helped delegitimized the Obama and Bush presidencies. In this way, Hillary must resist making easy compromises to clear the field.

Another critical consideration is that Bernie has not yet conceded that Hillary has won. He is holding out any concession until he sees how these negotiations play out. Refusing to admit that Hillary is the winner of the year-long battle will either damage Hillary or damage Bernie. All the optics will play one way or the other. So far his refusal to admit defeat looks like myopic petulance and he gets a little smaller every day. He clearly got shut out when he went to the White House for help getting concessions: they unrolled their enthusiastic endorsement of Hillary on-line before Bernie’s limo was down the White House drive way and Obama did not appear in front of the microphones with Bernie afterwards. He was shut down by Reid and Schumer and Biden that same afternoon as no joint appearances followed any of these closed door meeting: joint appearances after meetings are the great face saving bone thrown to most people in tense meetings and none of these democratic giants offered bernie any crumbs at all. Similarly Elizabeth Warren rolled out her endorsement as publicly as humanly possible: with an astonishingly enthusiastic hour long appearance with Rachel Maddow. That and Warren’s speech knocked Bernie, his big Washington day and his evening rally off of cable. The 2008 race still shimmers in our memories and we use it as a measuring stick: Obama and Hillary met the next day after the final primary night and she made her big ‘Cracks in the Glass Ceiling’ speech that Saturday. Bernie did not meet with Hillary the next day or the next, went begging for other Dems to negotiate with, made no concession. Hillary unified the party without him, secured the crucial Warren endorsement to lessen the need for his and let him have a meeting a week later a hotel suite rather than her house a few blocks away (where Hillary hosted Warren) or someone else’s House (the White House or Sen. Feinstein’s House where Barack and Hillary made peace and made plans in 2008). Every day that bernie plays his Paul Ryan-like deliberation game on whether to endorse, He looks a little worse and his endorsement means a little less. Meanwhile, every day that Hillary goes without getting his endorsement, she looks a little stronger and robust. Bernie’s endorsement and his working for her these next five months only matters if he can do so without qualifiers, if he can do so enthusiastically in a fill-throated ‘I’m-with-her!’ kind-of-way. In one week’s time he has shrunken quite small in stature and inconsequential: his demands sound more unreasonable every day. She seems more than fine without him smiling at her side or speaking on her behalf. Obama’s and Warren’s enthusiastic pledges to work on her behalf are the equivalent to a restaurant getting a fantastic review in the Times or their third Michelin star: she is all set.

He still has a mile or two of walking back just to get to middle ground where his endorsing her even makes any sense. It will strike most people as a bridge too far. He has to admit that she won by wide margins and that the party treated him fairly and that her positions on issues are what primary voters preferred over his ideas. He has to stop talking about super pacs because they absolutely are a key component to how we beat the republicans up and down the ticket these next five months of campaigning. he has to make peace with Debbie Wasserman Schultz and admit that his attacks on her were unfair. He has to turn over his mailing list of 2 ½ million unique donors and ten million names to the DNC’s senate and house election committees (Hillary doesn’t need it: no one can really argue she has ever needed help or lacked talent in raising money!). He has stop the rants about Wall Street. he has to reframe his ideas about paying for college to look more like hers. He has to embrace her approach to the minimum wage because her approach was built on what democratic senators and congress folks felt could pass and decided wouldn’t lose them their seats in upcoming elections. Can Bernie sign on to any of this? Would his ego or his followers accept any of it? No wonder he is dallying and is unable to sign on, because he can’t just sign on a little, or shop ala carte. He has to be able to defend her and her positions and her campaign, and there is nothing in Bernie’s history to suggest he will be able to do that.

Going back to 2008, that electoral city-on-a-hill now in our memories, Hillary was able to shift gears. We saw this week that Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren are able to shift gears. In 2008, it wasn’t enough that Hillary conceded and endorsed. her enthusiasm was a crucial piece of the deal. No one got a slot at the convention until Barack’s campaign knew that they would not water down their speeches in self serving ways. Hillary had to prove again and again that she had tied her fortune and future and reputation to Barack’s success: that she was with him. Can Bernie do the same? Most of us do not think so. He is a man who will happily shoot himself in the foot in these moments. Every time he let Jeff Weaver speak for his campaign proves that Bernie has a self destructive streak in his character. Even making public demands of Hillary ahead of meeting with her shoes this willingness to set himself on fire.

Why would Hillary begin this new stage of possibly becoming president by letting the person she lost to blackmail her with his possible endorsement? Why would she let that be the example of how she will do business in these next eight years? Let someone in her own party roll her? Lead her around by the nose? demand she beg for his endorsement? Congress and leader in the world is watching her every move right now. Will she fold? Hillary has to show the world that bernie and no one else will pull this nonsense. Bernie keeps pretending he has a good hand in the game but watch closely and see that Hillary isn’t playing cards and is only playing him: he will get nothing.

When he sat with Reid and then Schumer he saw how bad it was: he was looking for assurances that they would back his policy positions through congress and he left the meeting not even sure if he would get a seat on any committees these next 8 years. Hillary doesn’t even have to freeze him out: he has miles to walk back just to be on middle ground with his peers in the House and the Senate. He accused them all of being corrupt and part of the establishment. He lacked their respect before the campaign and none of them supporting him demonstrates that. That all of them voice pleasantries about bernie when asked these past 12 months only meant that there was a strict party line on Bernie and that out of loyalty to Hillary and the party they were all sticking to that single talking point. Nothing that happened in these past 10 months of campaigning convinced them that they were wrong about endorsing Hillary and stiff-arming Bernie and we can assume that all of them -super delegates after all- are relishing the sight of Bernie slowly twisting in the wind, getting no sympathy anywhere in Washington, losing substantial ground every day, still muttering about revolution and all his failed ideas.

What of his platform positions? He won’t change the wording on any of her positions but will have to change his or live in the wilderness these next eight years. Does anyone imagine that if he had somehow won the nomination that he would have been pressed to adopt any of her approaches to issues and policy? There is massive sexism bubbling under all these incredible assumptions that Hillary must somehow placate Bernie or his supporters, and the sexism blinds the people who say such things from seeing the idiocy of their remarks: Hillary won and her ideas won. Bernie Lost and his ideas lost. His campaign is not a movement that carries on anymore than Nader’s campaign or Perot’s campaign or John Anderson’’s campaigns were movements with legs to last. That bernie’s fundraising dried up quickly and profoundly as his prospects for getting the nomination dimmed after the New York primary shows that it was always a campaign and never a revolution, and that it will be a footnote in the much longer lasting history of the truly remarkable nomination of the first woman by a major party.

Hillary had to show that she could beat Bernie and now she has to show that she can say no to Bernie. To watch the pageantry of it all is bliss to a Hillary supporter like me.