John Hirschauer writes at National Review Online about the limits of Bernie Sanders’ appeal to Democratic voters.

[S]ingle-payer health care is more appealing in its blurriest outlines than it is when it comes into focus — much like its most prominent proponent, Bernie Sanders.

Sanders enjoys significant personal popularity and has for most of his career. He has become the most popular senator in America by sticking to the same operative philosophy for most if not all of his professional life. (Joe Rogan called him “insanely consistent.”) His policy positions — free college, universal health care, and other expensive giveaways — poll fairly well among voters when framed in abstract terms that elide the costs involved in implementing them. As he frequently reminds the American people with a sense of conviction and moral urgency that stirs up an almost religious fervor among his supporters, he “happens to believe” health care is a yoo-man right.

At some point, though, utopian platitudes have to become concrete policy proposals. …

… Unfortunately for Sanders, after those electoral victories, he became the race’s clear front-runner. Once that happened, Democratic voters were no longer weighing Bernie in the abstract — the jovial, if curmudgeonly, senator whom Paul Krugman strained to depict as a Scandinavian social democrat — but Bernie as a committed ideologue, happy to defend Fidel Castro’s literacy program and the poverty-reduction efforts of Communist China.

For all of the Bernie Bros’ indignation with a Democratic establishment that richly deserves their scorn, it was still the voters who handed Joe Biden — a doddering old warhorse who had seemed a dead man walking for months — a resounding victory on Super Tuesday.