It is time for Bernie to back Hillary: We love you Bernie but now we must deal with Trump

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/hillary-clinton-democratic-nominee-now-left-begins-bargain-painful-reality-and-hopeful?akid=14333.294211.BChVFU&rd=1&src=newsletter1057952&t=8

It tells us something about the current state of the Democratic Party that the boring, normal candidate has defeated the exciting outsider. Whether it tells us something good or bad—for the party, for politics in general and for the country—is entirely a question of perspective. As you may have noticed, the Republican primary campaign had a somewhat different outcome. So whatever you can say about the impending general-election campaign, which may well be one of the most dire and distasteful in American history, it will definitely offer a stark contrast. I have argued repeatedly during this campaign season that the Democrats face their own version of the implosion and reconfiguration that has turned the Republican Party upside down and inside out in 2016, resulting in a nominee who stands for few of the party’s core beliefs and that its established leaders barely even pretend to support.

That’s still true, but with the nomination of Hillary Clinton now a fait accompli, it’s clearer than ever that Democrats and Republicans are in different states of institutional disrepair, and that their future trajectories will be different too. Even before the votes were cast in this week’s California and New Jersey primaries, the Associated Press and various other news organizations have calculated that Clinton has now surpassed the magic number of 2,383 delegates and will be the Democratic nominee. This was clearly an orchestrated maneuver, designed to take the sting out of a possible Bernie Sanders victory in California, the last and biggest prize on the primary calendar. That doesn’t make it untrue.

For “progressives” on the Democratic left (or to the left of that left), who saw an opportunity this year to out-Trump the populist right by retaking the party from the pro-corporate center-right forces that have controlled it since the Bill Clinton era, the bargaining process now begins. I don’t mean the behind-the-scenes negotiations that began this week with President Obama’s phone call to Bernie Sanders and that will inevitably end with Sanders endorsing Clinton, no matter how unthinkable that remains to some of his supporters. Those are interesting too, but I’m talking about the stage of the Kübler-Ross grieving process known as “bargaining,” as many of us begin to make our peace with what happened in this year’s Democratic campaign and look toward the future.