Reticence created an enthuism gap

[JCanete]

3. agreements between Obama and Clinton were almost certainly made to achieve that result, or at least

I think that's a damn good bet. I would assume Sanders and Clinton teams also had discussions. It could be that what was being put on the table, if anything, was not the olive leaf Sanders was holding out for.

This is my own opinion and I know they vary and that none of us are privy to the mind's of the candidates, but here goes anyway:

Having campaigned for one very particular reason--to move the Democratic frontrunner to the left--I feel that had the Clinton team made serious gestures towards championing some of Sander's causes at this point in the campaign, that he would have happily bowed out. My own entirely uncorroborated guess(as everybody else's opinion on this matter will be), is that Sanders saw the writing on the wall...that Clinton and the establishment was about to put his unprecedentedly funded campaign behind her. You might say that the sportsman-like thing, the honorable thing, to do would be to bow out when you lose. This isn't a game though. That kind of groundswell that Sanders achieved doesn't come around that often, and it was about to be entirely discarded(again, my own interpretation).

Sanders could allow that to happen, or he could get the Democratic establishment to realize that it needed to pay attention to its left-most constituency. He used what he had, and that was the ability to take things all the way to the convention with the support of enough funding and enthusiasm.

So I don't deny that criticisms from the left hurt Clinton, but I disagree that the problem was Sanders or the left. At the end of the day, maybe she lost a few votes from some liberals, but most of us turned up for her anyway, myself in large part because she and the party eventually adopted some of Sander's positions and proposals. I really needed them to say something concrete already. On the other hand, the corporate media destroyed her and delivered a huge chunk of the country, as it always does, to the Republican opponent...yeah, the same big money influences that we keep trying to maintain relationships with. That's how that's going.