Tuesday will be the end of the road for the most likable candidate in the presidential race, Bernie Sanders. He might keep going a little longer, in stubborn phantom mode, but his loss to Hillary Clinton in South Carolina was so wide, at nearly 50 points, that he’s sure to lose bigly, to quote Donald Trump, across the rest of the South on Super Tuesday. I imagine he’ll pull out of the race this month, maybe even as soon as later this week. (No, Sanders fans, I’m not trying to make this happen; I’m happy to be wrong. Please, please, no more ALL CAPS emails.) In the meantime, the insurgency will end among Democrats, and they’ll become boring. Republicans, with bonfires and pitchforks and ultimatums and panics over the Trumpening, will steal the show. But, before that happens, let’s take a look back at what Sanders achieved and didn’t.

Sanders started as a message candidate and then, to what was surely his own surprise, became a serious candidate who posed a genuine threat to his rival. It was a great accomplishment. Candidates usually permit themselves to become more hopeful than the evidence merits, and Sanders was no exception. According to Alex Seitz-Wald of MSNBC, Sanders was so confident of winning in Nevada that he didn’t even prepare a concession speech. His reaction to losing in South Carolina, characterized as “churlish” by some commenters, seemed more like that of someone who was genuinely stunned.

Could Sanders, if he’d done things a little differently, have won the nomination? That’s what many people will be asking themselves. I think the answer is no. Sanders obviously had a powerful message that could have been even more powerful if he’d attacked his rival properly. But that’s a bit like saying that a golden retriever would be a great fighter if it just acted more like a pit bull. Sanders is Sanders. He doesn’t go for the throat. Many Democrats were desperate for an alternative to Hillary Clinton, but Sanders was too parochial, and too gentle.

How was Sanders parochial? Simply put, he cared a lot about our increasingly rigged economy—and it is a doozy—but only that. Presidents must show much interest in other things, especially global affairs, which they handle nonstop. That’s a major component of Clinton’s pitch for herself: that she can manage a dangerous world. She represents a “muscular” foreign policy, which is a nice way of saying she’s happy to pull out the guns. Now, that’s not necessarily the best or safest stance. Many Democrats would prefer a less interventionist foreign policy. But Sanders was a limp champion of such an alternative. He stressed that he had voted "No" to authorizing force in Iraq, but he never offered much of a worldview to explain the decision, which meant that it was hard to tell what framework he might bring to future decisions. Clinton’s vulnerability stayed mostly unexploited.

Then there was Sanders’ gentleness. You wouldn’t call Bernie a teddy bear, and he has a reputation for being tough—to the point of nastiness—on his staff. But he has a fundamental decency that keeps him from going nuclear on his rivals. Sanders wanted to win, but he never wished to do so at the price of damaging Clinton for the general election. He gave her a pass on her use of a private email server, and he never ginned up a chorus asking her to release the transcripts of her speeches to Goldman Sachs. Clinton would never have shown such restraint toward a rival, as we know from her Somme-like attacks on Barack Obama in 2008. Certainly, no such scruples are being exercised on the Republican side, where Donald Trump is calling his opponents liars and little boys and Marco Rubio is calling Trump a small-handed con artist.