WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Bernie Sanders has been talking about a political revolution for months but Democratic Party leaders appear to be shocked, shocked that it’s not just a rhetorical flourish.

Revolutions are messy, they are impertinent. They are driven by passion. Their very purpose is to reject the reasonableness that keeps things the way they are.

Daily Beast columnist Michael Tomasky — who has consistently been a reliable surrogate for Hillary Clinton’s campaign — now suggests that by keeping his hard-driving campaign going Sanders “wants to destroy the Democratic Party.”

Well, yes — what part of “political revolution” don’t you understand?

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There are millions of Democrats and progressives — the 10 million who have voted for Sanders in primaries so far for starters — who don’t like the corporatist, triangulating Democratic Party created by the Clintons and want to fundamentally remake it.

They want change, and actress Susan Sarandon was only stating the obvious when she drew so much opprobrium for suggesting that many of them will see Donald Trump as the agent of change if Sanders isn’t on the ticket in November.

Tomasky, in fact, depicts Sanders (putting Jane Sanders in for the ride as well) as “Thelma and Louise” — one of Sarandon’s best-known films — as ready to drive off a cliff, which, of course, is only something a crazy person would do and has nothing to do with existential despair.

“Sanders willing to harm Clinton in homestretch,” the New York Times blares in the headline of its lead story Thursday, over what purports to be a news story but in fact is that blend of bias and interpretation that has come to characterize a newspaper that used to make some claim to objectivity.

The mainstream media largely ignored the chaos at Democratic state delegate convention in Nevada over the weekend (“Clinton nets 2 more delegates at raucous Nevada convention” was typical of headlines in papers that bothered to report it), until they took their cue from Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz to focus on the unacceptable behavior of some of the Sanders’s supporters, especially in the aftermath of the convention.

Even though Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver — in the same election-night broadcast on CNN Tuesday where Wasserman Schultz spoke — unequivocally condemned the violence, profanity and threats at the convention and leveled at the state chair, Roberta Lange, afterward, that wasn’t good enough for those spinning the fracas in Clinton’s favor.

Weaver’s statement and those made by Sanders himself didn’t use just the right words, didn’t address it the right order, weren’t firm enough — and most of all they wanted to keep the focus on the unfair practices that prompted the frustration to begin with.

It is not, at the end of the day, Bernie Sanders’s job to get Hillary Clinton elected — that task is Clinton’s and Clinton’s alone.

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If Sanders is in a position to “harm” her by pointing out what is wrong with her candidacy and the corrupt campaign finance system that envelops both parties, Clinton needs to find a way to counter that.

If Clinton cannot generate the enthusiasm that Sanders can and cannot appeal to the voters under 45 who don’t share baby boomers’ obsessive aversion to the Nader effect, then she needs to figure how to do that, not count on Sanders to deliver that voter segment.

Boomers, in particular, blame Ralph Nader’s run as an independent in 2000 for draining off the votes that might have tipped the electoral scales in Al Gore’s favor. Ultimately, of course, the reason Gore lost in 2000 is because he didn’t win enough votes in the right places.

But this election, even more than Gore’s in 2000, has been Clinton’s to lose from the beginning, and she is actually making a pretty good success of doing that.

Despite all the media spin to the contrary, there is growing reason to think that Trump can beat Clinton in the general election.

The Republicans have already shown that they prefer this agent of change to all the Ted Cruzes, Marco Rubios, John Kasiches and others who have given us the dysfunctional politics we suffer under.

Had the Democratic Party not stacked the deck by pledging most of the “superdelegates” to Clinton before the campaign even began and by closing off many of the primaries to the independents who will decide the general election, there’s every chance that Clinton, too, would be on the losing end of voters’ favor for the nomination.

Even leaving aside an FBI investigation into Clinton’s email practices at the State Department or revelations that may come from civil actions against her in this regard or with regard to Clinton Foundation donations, the Democratic front-runner has shown herself increasingly vulnerable as her favorability ratings continue to decline.

Blame Sanders all you want for exposing these vulnerabilities while pursuing his goal of radical change in the Democratic Party and American politics, but Trump and the Republicans are certain to pull out all the stops to “harm” her in the general election campaign, so she’d better have some answers.

Clinton’s vulnerability is not Sanders’s fault. The blame for that rests solely with the candidate herself.