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California Sen. Barbara Boxer says that Sanders faces a “test of leadership” in cooling out his supporters and bringing them into the party. But the real test of leadership – as it has been throughout this campaign – isn’t about Sanders; it is about Clinton. Will the Clinton campaign be smart enough to understand the importance of learning from him, embracing a bolder vision and speaking clearly to a far deeper pain?

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Does anybody truly believe that, had Sanders run as an independent, he would have made such a large political impact on this race? By running as a Democrat, Sanders has advanced progressive politics at the national level far more effectively than has Jill Stein, or even Ralph Nader. There is a lesson there.

Bernie Sanders will go to Philadelphia with more pledged delegates than any insurgent in modern history. Here's what he could do with them. Donald Trump is more dangerous than ever. Hillary Clinton is perhaps the worst possible Democratic candidate who could ever run against Donald Trump. Trump just conceivably could beat her in the general election. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, would give Donald Trump fits in a head-to-head match up. Let me break it down.

Sanders has been already been counted out in the mainstream media. But young voters, liberals flooded into the polling booths and swept Sanders to victory. Picking up a net of five delegates, Sanders may not be winning his struggle against the delegate math, as the mainstream media keeps reminding us, but he is winning the political debate.

A convention fight this summer in Philadelphia offers Sanders the opportunity to make significant reforms to the Democratic Party. He should continue fighting to mobilize every last voter and delegate behind his agenda of guaranteed universal rights to healthcare, education, and dignified conditions - and continue impressing the necessity for ongoing mass agitation (what he calls the "political revolution") to accomplish the same.

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"He's not moving a party to the left. He's moving a generation to the left," Della Volpe said of the senator from Vermont. "Whether or not he's winning or losing, it's really that he's impacting the way in which a generation - the largest generation in the history of America - thinks about politics."

Bernie Sanders should keep running, but he needs to lay out what exactly he's fighting for. Time and again the Sanders challenge has forced Clinton off dead center. Sanders's supporters can also take comfort in the certainty that it is they - the millions of $27 donors-who represent not only the future of the Democratic Party and the only hope for democracy in this country.