OK. Hug your kids. Walk your dog. Have a drink. Smoke some weed. Eat some edibles. Gobble some ‘shrooms. Meditate. Contemplate. Ruminate. Calm down. Find peace. Take a breath. Take a pill. Take a break. Calm down, Ringo, and, for the love of god, chill the fck out, Yolanda. Bernie Sanders won the Nevada caucuses. He won handily. He won easily. As a matter of fact, he probably won Saturday night last week, when 75 percent of the voters cast early ballots. Bernie Sanders is the clear frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination. He is the clear frontrunner because he and his people have been developing a strategy for five years and they have been executing it splendidly. Those are the facts on the ground and they are incontestable.

(One solid indication of the depth of his appeal is that, almost immediately after the New Hampshire primary, the culinary workers union in Nevada slammed him over Medicare For All—but, on Saturday, the actual membership of that powerful union turned out for him in droves.)

Of course, none of that prevented a general freakout on television and online. Chris Matthews compared the most successful Jewish presidential candidate in American history to the triumphant Wehrmacht. James Carville looked very much like he might stroke out right there on live TV. Here’s what these two galoots, as well as the Sanders partisans who see Bill ’n Hill behind every tree, don’t seem to understand: the Clintonized Democratic party is dead. It died in November of 2016 and it has been replaced even in warm, pointless nostalgia by the Obama years. It’s time to move on. It’s time for the 2016 Democratic primaries to end. Come down out of your cave in the hills and turn in your weapons and greet the 21st century.

Sanders is the frontrunner. Drew Angerer Getty Images

Meanwhile, Pete Buttigieg, the man who will unify us to turn the page to a bright new day in which we will galvanize and not polarize, gave a speech early in the evening that, for sheer optimistic inspiration, lacked only a bell and a guy intoning, “Bring out your dead.” (There was one great moment on MSNBC when Steve Kornacki told the panel that, according to the network’s entrance polling, Buttigieg didn’t register among black voters. At all.) On the other side, the Sanders people have started measuring the drapes already. People supporting other candidates are being told to get in line or get the hell out. (In fact, that he has managed to get to this position with a national staff containing some people whose only apparent political skill is being pissed on television and snotty online is a further measure of what a formidable candidate he is.) This prompted pushback, and the pushback prompted more pushback, until the desert itself was a’light with the fires from a thousand flaming heads.

Here, for example, is a very bad number: according to MSNBC, only 53 percent of Sanders’s caucus-goers said they would guarantee their support for the eventual nominee if that wasn’t Sanders. This is as bad as those people who have been proudly announcing that Sanders scares them so much that they can’t manage to do their democratic duty to bring this renegade presidency to an end. And, ultimately, I was reminded on the Intertoobz of the great line from Charles Laughton in Witness for the Prosecution. On his way home from a lengthy hospitalization, Laughton already is fed up with Elsa Lanchester, his voluble live-in nurse, and finally he tells her:



“If I’d known you were such a chatterbox, I’d have stayed in the coma.”



It’s time for the 2016 Democratic primaries to end. Come down out of your cave in the hills and turn in your weapons.

Going forward, here’s what I think. It’s time for both billionaires to get out. They’re not going to be president, either one of them, and they’re not helping anyone else who might be. Tom Steyer’s campaign is utterly pointless and seems dedicated at this point only to mucking up the South Carolina primary. If the Democrats nominate Michael Bloomberg, they’re taking a bigger risk than they ever would by nominating Sanders because given what we already know about him, and anticipating that we’re going to learn even more—and worse—stuff as the campaign grinds on, he’s the only candidate that could give someone in the vote-blue-no-matter-who crowd the same pause that the aforementioned 53 percent of Sanders voters have. Plus, my god, he’s a terrible candidate.

As for Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, a continued Biden bounce-back in South Carolina means they’re both drawing dead. Their money will dry up and, seriously, when the margin of error among minority voters shows the possibility that your appeal could be in negative numbers, you have serious problems up and down the next few weeks.

Sanders won the Nevada caucuses handily. Drew Angerer Getty Images

Senator Professor Warren is confronted by a simpler prospect. She has to win somewhere. Anywhere. And not just in Massachusetts, where, it should be noted, she’s only running even with Sanders. (Needless to say that losing her home state to Sanders would take the edge off any Super Tuesday win she might have elsewhere.) Hell, she has to finish ahead of Buttigieg somewhere. That means she needs another big debate performance next week. It also means that, starting now, she has to draw as clear a line between herself and Sanders as she has between herself and Bloomberg. In her Seattle speech, she threw an elbow at him about his support for the filibuster, and her refrain about actually doing something and not just talking about it could be interpreted as a shot at him, but you might need the Enigma machine to conclude that.



For weeks now, Democrats opposed to Sanders, as well as the nervous-in-the-service Never Trump Republicans, have been acting as though Warren’s primary function in the field was to take out Sanders as their suicide bomber. That was as stupid as it was insulting. But, as of Saturday night, she doesn’t have a choice any more. Her path is still there, but it’s narrowing and Sanders is the fight in front of her now. Otherwise, it’s Sanders, Biden, and Bloomberg’s bottomless wallet.

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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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