Just now, Bernie Sanders emerged from his meeting with President Obama. After the meeting Senator Sanders said, among other things, that he was going to campaign until the next and final primary in Washington DC on June 14th.

The American coverage of Bernie Sanders over the past 24 hours has been a concerted effort to get him to quit so the various media outlets can focus on the battle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and this is why Bernie is right not to “gracefully step aside”.

Bernie Sanders represents the serious concerns of the political left in America. He represents the frustration of “the rest”. Hillary Clinton simply does not have the ability to address the gross inequality in American society with the credibility that Sanders can.

For example, Clinton has taken money from large banks, she only started supporting marriage equality relatively recently , and she is a career politician. She is a very good career politician but being a good career politician means that she has had to have a lot of varying/opaque positions over the decades. Bernie Sanders does not have to deal with that. He has the power be the voice and champion of “the rest” while Hillary becomes the seasoned leader.

Furthermore, the Democrats need those enthusiastic Bernie supporters. Those supporters are not all party animals who will fall behind the winner. Some will stay home and some will go to Trump so the Democrats cannot afford to force Senator Sanders to disappear. Doing so would alienate at least some of the Sanders supporters and the Dems are going to need every vote they can get in November.

Finally, going all the way to the end is the ONLY way that Bernie can finish this race. Just like in Cool Runnings he has fought hard and valiantly, campaigning on issues that no one else wanted to talk about. Student loan debt, childhood poverty, even DC becoming a state. All of these things are real domestic issues that would have been swept under the rug if it was not for his run at the nomination. He dominated the news cycle and continues to do so today.

Bernie deserves his stride of pride.

Trump wants America to be afraid, he wants to run an American version of Project Fear but, letting Bernie walk to the end of the race with his head held high shows that America may reject Project Fear and once again embrace hope.