Charlie Pierce: It's Time for the 2016 Primary to End. [View all]

[Dennis Donovan]

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a31064861/bernie-sanders-wins-nevada-caucuses-frontrunner/

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
FEB 23, 2020

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.

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.

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