It's been said before that establishment Democrats would rather lose to a Republican than win with a leftist, but now we have proof. That proof comes in the form of smears by center-right, Clinton loyalists who are working overtime to undermine the obvious Democratic front-runner, Bernie Sanders.

Philippe Reines, a political consultant and former Clinton adviser, appeared on MSNBC. He claimed Sanders had not reached out to any of the 17 million, who did not vote for him in 2016. This is false. Sanders visited several states in the south in April 2018, including South Carolina, to make inroads with black voters.
...“It seems like there’s an arrogance among Sanders supporters,” Reines added.

What Reines means is that not only are Bernie supporters not obeying the neoliberal establishment, but they are actually daring to dismiss them. For an entitled class, this is unforgivable.
What is stunning even for Washington politics, is how they do the Republican's dirty work while still pretending to be loyal Democrats. If the rolls were reversed, Clintonites would be crying 'treason'.

And then, there is Zac Petkanas, who was the rapid response director for Clinton’s 2016 campaign. He took some of the opposition research the Clinton campaign had available and wrote a column for NBC News outlining the basics of how his Democratic Party opponents could attack him in 2020.
...Clinton Democrats seem intent to re-litigate the 2016 primary until Sanders supporters submit to their petty political analysis. They still suffer from post-2016 election trauma and struggle to cope in a world where the politics of their opponent are widely viewed as the answer to Trump and very few are clamoring for a Democrat like Clinton to return for a third campaign.

“I don’t have a problem with Bernie getting in the race, ‘when is he getting out’ is probably a better question.”
- Bakari Sellers

“You can see why she’s one of the most disliked politicians in America. She’s not nice. Her people are not nice.”
- Sanders 2016 presidential campaign spokesman, Michael Briggs, called Team Clinton

Attacking Bernie is not dividing Dems. It's no different than attacking Trump. So I agree. Pile on! #NeverBernie

— Defendant 1 (@andreafed) March 2, 2019

Hey @BernieSanders are you also going to explain the Russian assistance your 2016 campaign had (Tad) and WHY you chose NOT to vote for Russian sanctions and WHY you voted to take sanctions off Deripaska????

Take your Russian Revolution somewhere else!! #NeverBernie

— Liesl (@lieslelove) March 2, 2019

“I think that at some point bygones can be bygones, but what you can’t get around is the electability question.”
- David Brock

“It is not a secret that people who would hang out with David Brock would be putting their class interests ahead of the party and the country.”
- Jeff Weaver

Republicans and Clintonites and the news media has been attacking him for three years, and yet they've barely even scratched his favorability.

He's got the broadest base of support by far, the most grassroots support by far, and has the most money by far. If he was anyone else with neoliberal values the Democratic establishment would be celebrating him.
I can think of only two modern examples of a party establishment undermining their obvious front runner: Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn.

Both Trump and Corbyn were fought by their party establishment and MSM, and welcomed by the opposition party that badly underestimated them.
However, Trump won by virtue of enormous piles of money, celebrity status and outrageous lies.
Corbyn is succeeding by building a broad-based grassroots movement, like Bernie is. Thus, Corbyn's saga since winning the leadership of the Labour Party is both instructive and predictive for Bernie's campaign.

Although at first not taken seriously — in mid-July, the Telegraph provided a “handy five-step guide” to conservatives for how to join Labour and vote for Corbyn in order to “condemn Labour to years in the political wilderness” — Corbyn soon became the target of attacks. For “moderate” Labour MPs, who had long accepted the Third Way theory that only moving rightward could win elections, Corbyn’s success seemed to pose a danger to Labour’s electability (as well a danger to how true that theory was).
...
Tony Blair was one of the most frequent voices on this front. In July, he told Labour voters that “if your heart’s with Jeremy Corbyn, get a transplant.” He further added that “radical leftism was often quite reactionary,” and that he “wouldn’t want to win on an old fashioned leftist platform.” (Note that, far from the usual Third Way protests about electability, Blair here is quite clear about his hostility to left-wing policies on principle).

In August, he warned that “Jeremy Corbyn’s politics are fantasy — just like Alice in Wonderland.” Earlier that month, he cautioned that, with Corbyn at the helm, “the party won’t just face defeat but annihilation,” warning that voters “don’t think their challenges can be met by old-fashioned state control” and think “that a party without a serious deficit-reduction plan is not in these times a serious contender to govern them.”

Does any of this sound familiar? It does to me. Just replace Blair with Clinton.
If you still don't see the similarities, check this out.

It didn’t matter that the public at the time broadly agreed with Corbyn’s policies. It didn’t matter that more than forty economists, including a former adviser to the Bank of England, signed a letter dismissing criticisms that they were too extreme, or that thirty-five other economists did the same. It wouldn’t even matter, a month later, when the Financial Times published two pieces defending Corbyn’s policies, including his “people’s quantitative easing,” which had been roundly derided (the New Yorker would later call it “an endearing and almost childlike solution”).

Neither did it matter that Corbyn’s support from rank-and-file party members was broad. In a four-way race, by mid-August, Corbyn was the choice of 49 percent of existing Labour members, 67 percent of trade union supporters, and 55 percent of those who had paid £3 to vote, putting him 32 points ahead his closest rival. Nonetheless, his opponents in the party would later claim his win was the result of far-Left “infiltration” of the party.

At this point the pattern matches up to the Sanders campaign of today.
That's good news, because this happened next.

As the prospect of beating Corbyn became more and more remote, they even considered launching a legal challenge against the election process.
None of it worked. Corbyn won with 59.5 percent of the vote. Burnham, the runner-up, received 19 percent. According to the Guardian, “shell-shocked members of the shadow cabinet, some on the verge of tears, gathered together in small groups in the foyer” in reaction to the victory, while others “continued plotting, in the manner of Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender at the end of the second world war.”

Blairites = Clintonites.
Plain and simple, and I think that by this time next year we could make Clintonites cry too. Wouldn't that make it all worthwhile?
But here's the cautionary part of the tale: Blairites never gave up. They fought tooth-and-nail to undermine Corbyn, and have never stopped, even when it was obvious they could never win. Even when Corbyn led Labour to it's largest election gains in decades.
Eventually some of them sided with the Tories.
We should expect the same from Clintonites.