Bernie Sanders' campaign ends

Bernie is principled and honorable. He plays by the rules that should be, not the rules that are.

He's perfect for starting a movement. He'll clearly express his principles. People who share the principles will gather around him. He lives his principles, which makes him easy to follow.

He was a good Senator. Disdaining deals, he operated by amendments on the open floor. This kept him from determining the shape of major legislation, because that's a business of deals. He found a good place as a source of inspired small-bore improvements and a reliable Democratic team player who wore a funny jersey for his own reasons. The system accommodates Senators' quirks, and Bernie's quirk was his principles.

He's not good at running a large organization like a campaign. He often chooses personnel who are better at expressing his worldview than winning him an election. His surrogates drew the media spotlight, but sowed conflict with the DC media as well as the black establishment in the South, both of which operated on rules alien to them.

Recently his press secretary complained on Twitter about a podcast on Vox not paying attention to Bernie. The podcaster replied that he had emailed her inviting Bernie for a long interview on the podcast months ago, and he was still waiting for her reply.

This campaign's MVP staffer, Lis Smith, had the opposite approach. She made Mayor Pete a contender by putting him on all media at all times. Team Pete thought its job was to spread Pete's message. Team Bernie thought its job was to complain about others not spreading Bernie's message.

We'll learn more about what went wrong with the campaign in the next few days. But the picture of Bernie I'm left with is that of a simple and straightforward kind of very good person. He wasn't made to make deals, much less command armies.

He's made to express and live his principles, clearly and directly. They're good principles, and good people are drawn to his side. If that were all it took to achieve power, this would be a lovely world.

Bernie 2020: the right principles + dumb anti-establishment orientation

Last year Bernie Sanders convinced me that prisoners should be allowed to vote. The issue hadn't crossed my mind until he raised it, but I quickly realized he was right. Politicians neglect and mistreat groups who are denied the vote, and the horrific cruelties of the US prison system are a result.

Fresh new ideas like this were the best thing about the Sanders campaign. Polls showed that most Democrats agreed with him on issues like Medicare for All [M4A], even as they voted for Joe Biden. With Sanders underperforming his 2016 numbers, his inner circle is now deciding whether to end the campaign. It's a good time to consider why he performed so badly despite the popularity of his biggest ideas.

His campaign combined good policy directions with a dumb political idea: that progress on issues like M4A would require overthrowing the Democratic establishment. As far as I can tell, this idea came from staff and allies who didn't really understand the Democratic Party and didn't understand how to engage constructively with people in it.

Things started well in 2017. Bernie got 16 Senate co-sponsors for M4A. The stage was set for a campaign that could absorb reformist elements of the establishment and thus become a majority of the party. What you'd want is a hopeful and optimistic message, embracing establishment figures who came reasonably close to Bernie's position. The establishment itself hadn't coalesced around a single candidate like Hillary, making it possible for Bernie to win a majority by incorporating enough of its leftward fragments.

Having spent time on Twitter during this primary, I can tell you that this isn't the Sanders campaign we got. One avoided conflict with Sanders' supporters more by taking positions far from him, as Biden and Klobuchar did, than by coming closer like Warren. Buttigieg, ever the political calculator, saw what was happening and abandoned his support for M4A. Obama was presented more as a centrist enemy than as a Democratic friend. The message of the campaign was enmity between it and the party, to the point that top Sanders activists like Shaun King don't realize that lefty Senators like Brian Schatz agree with them.

Bernie's campaign could've instead advertised M4A as building on the coverage expansions of Obamacare. Knowing that Congress would drastically revise the details of any Presidential proposal, every co-sponsor could've been treated as an ally, with attacks reserved mainly for those opposed to the general idea of Medicare for All.

The anti-establishment message itself seems to have caused Sanders trouble with the black political establishment in the South. Biden defeated Sanders 81-15 in Mississippi, where the only Congressional Democrat and the Senate nominee are both black. Jim Clyburn explained his decisive endorsement of Biden partly as a response to Sanders' anti-establishment message, which he took as an attack on himself. And an unfriendly attitude towards Obama was not going to help.

There are all kinds of problems with the Democratic Party as a whole, as with any large institution. American politics is full of legalized corruption, and politics everywhere is full of self-serving people. But if you need corrupt people's votes to pass something like M4A, the first thing to do is to figure out what currency they accept. If they need time, give them time until you actually need their votes.

With the right strategy, Bernie could have won this primary. His ideas are largely popular within the party. But attacking Democratic establishment figures isn't the way to win over Democratic primary voters. I suppose that's what one should expect.

The deadly power of bats' immune systems

Why do bats carry so many viruses? They're vectors for Covid-19 and Ebola as well as old terrors like rabies.

Bat immune systems are unusually strong. Their cells emit very high levels of interferon, which slows down protein synthesis. So when a virus takes over a cell and starts making new copies of itself, it can't assemble all the proteins to make new viruses.

Bat immune systems may also be stronger because bats fly. Flying requires a lot of energy, keeping them in a hot and fever-like body state. This can cook viruses to death.

Creatures with strong immune systems tend to have the most dangerous pathogens. Anything that survives in them will be hard for others to beat. If you get a virus, your body will fight it by running a fever and emitting interferon. This stops many viruses. But making your insides more batlike isn't going to stop a bat virus.

There's a human version of this in European settlers having diseases that killed most of the native Americans and Australians, rather than the other way around. Having lived in dense cities and traded goods and diseases with the rest of Eurasia, Europeans' immune systems had evolved to be strong. So they were sources of strong diseases, especially smallpox, that killed most of the local folks.

The bat immune system might have given us our idea of vampirism, via rabies. The symptoms of both conditions overlap quite a bit. You get rabies from being bitten by a bat or an infected human. You become a vampire from being bitten by a nocturnal creature between bat and human.

It's really a shame about bats, because they're amazing. If bats didn't exist, the idea of a mammal that flies, uses sonar, sleeps upside-down all day, eats mosquitos, and poops super-fertilizer would seem batshit crazy. Unfortunately, their strong immune systems give them a viral dark side that lives up to vampirical legend.