Martin O’Malley remembers running for president like this: He is on a train, heading for a bridge. He can see the bridge is giving out. He is shouting and waving and pointing at a “better lane,” he says. “But it’s like I couldn’t get anybody on the train to listen.”

“It was the most frustrating experience I’ve ever had in politics.”

O’Malley was still a young mayor in Baltimore, elected at 36, when he started hearing people say he might one day “go all the way.” Now, at 54, on the other side of that dream, he is at turns resigned to and not yet at peace with the eight months he spent as a candidate for the Democratic nomination. That his 2016 campaign never caught fire, or even much of a spark, is a reality he reasons with in one moment, ticking off outside contributing factors, before adding in the next that, in fact, “None of it made sense.”

Well Governor, perhaps that’s because you believe it’s easy to get a train to “change lanes.”

If it weren’t a waste of time to correct Tyrell, I’d point out that the US Democratic party is to the right of nearly every other party on earth that isn’t explicitly the party of racist jingoism in its home nation. US Democrats are to the right of UK Conservatives.