Sanders can’t turn now to the insiders

After his convincing defeat in New York last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders trails badly in terms of pledged convention delegates. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, has a lead of 2.7 million votes in the popular vote as well.

And it’s not going to get better anytime soon. If the polls prove accurate, Clinton will do very well in the five primaries scheduled for Tuesday, extending her lead in delegates and popular support and making it all but impossible for Sanders to claim an eventual majority.

True, as Sanders has pointed out several times, a lot of that lead and a lot of those delegates have come as a result of Clinton victories here in the South. But Southern Democrats count too, at least in Democratic primaries.

In an interview on MSNBC last week, Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver suggested that Clinton’s lead somehow shouldn’t matter and shouldn’t dictate the outcome of the race. Even if the primary season ends with Clinton ahead in terms of earned delegates and the popular vote, Weaver said, the Sanders campaign will fight to convince the party’s 719 unpledged superdelegates to overturn that outcome. That is a very bad idea. In practical terms, it is a bad idea because it is doomed to failure. Those 719 superdelegates are the Democratic establishment, the party leaders and elected officeholders. The notion that they are going to reject Clinton in favor of Sanders, and by doing so ignore the opinion of Democratic voters as it has been expressed in the voting booth, is ludicrous.

It is also a bad idea because it would contradict much of what Sanders and his supporters have claimed to champion in their surprisingly successful “up from the grassroots” campaign. From the very beginning of the race, the Sanders campaign has presented itself as a popular uprising against the establishment. It has insisted that the nomination ought to be decided by actual Democratic primary voters, not by party bosses and unelected superdelegates representing the establishment. As recently as a month ago, Sanders was arguing that superdelegates from states that he has carried had a moral obligation to listen to their constituents and vote for him at the convention.

“It would be insane, even by the corrupt standards of the Democratic National Committee, if a small group of party elites went against the will of the people to choose the presidential nominee,” as one Sanders supporter argued back in February, in the heady days after Sanders won New Hampshire.

If Sanders is now willing to throw that all aside by arguing that the opinion of the grassroots voters ought to be overturned in his favor by party insiders, then he exposes himself and his crusade as frauds. He tells his followers that in the end, when forced to choose between standing by his principles or grasping at power, he too chose to grasp at power. He tells them that despite his stirring rhetoric, this had really been all about him, and not about them.

That would be a tawdry way to end a campaign that has inspired millions and brought much-needed attention to important issues.