"My answer might cost me this race. I'm sorry. While many of you know that I am openly gay, what many of you don't know is that I came from the lowest of the white working class. Let me tell you, when we are running hundreds of millions of dollars worth of commercials telling the voters, oh, our opponent is offensive. When you are worried about your damn agent [correction: paycheck], your job, whether your kids are going to school, they don't really give a crap about if the president is an insult dog. The reality is that we did not offer a positive message. We did not offer a message to my neighbors. We did not offer a message to the people in Indiana or Ohio or Pennsylvania or Kentucky. What we did is say, how offensive! Grow up. That is not reality for most of America."

The message was completely different from the mood of the day, and was contradicted by the other candidates. Perhps that is why these dramatic words were completely ignored by David Weigel of the Washington Post when he summarized the day for his paper. What did make the cut included:

Saturday’s “future forum” was the last DNC gathering before Feb. 25, when Democrats will gather in Atlanta to elect new leaders. Over six public debates and a stream of TV interviews, the leading candidates had found themselves in combative agreement, arguing for a party that invests more in every state, disagreeing only about who should get them there.

The meeting here did not resolve that and showcased how the elongated race has delayed the final reckoning over the party’s 2016 primary result and the test of whether Democrats can channel the protests against President Trump breaking out every weekend.

“We cannot move forward if we continue to swim in this quicksand of anger,” said Yvette Lewis, a former Maryland Democratic Party chair and current DNC member. “That anger needs to be directed at Donald Trump.”

[Former Obama Labor Secretary Thomas] Perez, who is seen to have built a small lead in the race, had hit a tripwire while trying to calm nerves. In his speeches to local Democrats, and listening sessions in places where the party had lost badly, he had taken to saying that the 2015-era DNC unfairly scheduled late debates to benefit Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, but that the primary itself was fair. At one appearance, in Kansas, he had been unclear about what was “rigged,” but he had cleaned it up on Twitter.

That nonetheless started a round of commentary and angry social media, behavior that has worn down DNC members. One reason that relatively few of them have made public endorsements is angst about being hounded by calls and emails from supporters of Ellison, Sanders’s choice for the job — an echo of the long summer of 2016, when Sanders supporters badgered the DNC members whose superdelegate status theoretically gave them the right to deny Clinton the nomination.

The long-lasting bitterness has exhausted some Democrats, who simply want a chair in place. “In some sense, having 17 people run for president in 2016 was better than having two people,” said Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy (D), who like most elected Democrats endorsed Clinton. “What we ended up having was this long, drawn-out race that — unintentionally — ended up isolating people.”