Howard Dean, a Democrat and a former governor of Vermont, can sympathize. “It’s very hard to concede,” he said. “You are tired. You are cranky. You’ve worked your butt off for two years.”
Nobody, Mr. Dean said, resisted ending a presidential campaign more than he did. Once a high-flying front-runner, he had a string of setbacks that left him feeling, by February 2004, much as Mr. Sanders does today: furious at an unfair system and determined to fight on.
Then Al Gore called. Mr. Dean fulminated, uninterrupted, for 10 minutes, “ranting and raving,” he recalled. But Mr. Gore, schooled in the art of painful concessions, was blunt. “You know, Howard,” he said, “This is not really about you. This is about the country.”
Mr. Dean, taking the advice to heart, quit the campaign a few days later. “The minute he said it,” Mr. Dean recalled, “I looked like an idiot to myself.”
He said he wonders whether Mr. Sanders will heed the warning. “Bernie has changed politics, but his changes are not going to be realized unless he leads — and leading is not going to mean tilting at windmills at the convention,” Mr. Dean said. “He has to switch into the mode of a statesman.”
“You don’t get any points for carrying on or complaining about it,” Mr. Dean added. “You get points for sucking it up.”
