Wait until he's a real threat to Hillary

UCLA students for Bernie

If and when he gets that far the sisterhood and the race-baiters will turn on him.

He's too old, too white, and too male.

The only thing not wrong with him from the liberal point of view is that he's not a Christian; that would certainly have been one too many, not only depriving him of the invaluable tribal enthusiasm of the Jewish left but engaging the hostility and suspicion of both Jews and secularists.

Though her relative social conservatism and instinct for triangulation on social issues will not make it easy for them, the sisterhood, quiet so far, will remind us that the deal in 2008 was that that was the year of Obama, the historic black candidate, and next up would be Hillary, the historic female candidate.

They will also start bashing Bernie with everything from his long past that doesn't quite pass a contemporary feminist PC sniff test.

Poor Bernie just doesn't really sound as though his consciousness has ever been raised.

And the women will join the blacks in belaboring his whiteness and his unfortunate insensitivity to race per se, to blacks in particular and non-whites in general.

And that might play nicely into bashing him for his unfashionable apparent loyalty to the two-state solution, traditional Zionism, and the idea of an of course ethnically specific Jewish state, a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Conservatives have already played the race card against him for his opposition to mass low-wage immigration and his opposition to trade policies that have made the rich richer as well as the Chinese, the Mexicans, and others, all at the expense of American working people.

Both his ethnic Zionism and his American nationalism put him at loggerheads with the anti-nationalist cosmopolitanism of most influential younger liberals, notably Jewish ones, and will certainly come under fire if he rises to the point of posing a significant threat to Hillary, or even of influencing her positions.

He will get out of this long campaign all smiles only if he never really threatens Hillary.