That said, I can understand where the Bernie hardliners are at – as somebody put it today, they finally thought that they could vote for someone rather than against someone and succed. Disappointment is doubly hard after experiencing unanticipated hope – which the Sanders campaign gave them.

And of course they can’t be pacified at Bernie Sanders’ command. They aren’t his army; their fealty was to his policies before it was to him and they believe that Clinton will betray those policy preferences. They have bought too deeply into the negative Clinton narrative propagated by the right and a compliant media over the past 25 years. The real issue is how the almost entirely baseless Clinton narrative was allowed to take on such proportions within a progressive campaign.