It’s official.

Bernie Sanders has endorsed Hillary Clinton.

Video: "I am proud to stand with her today."— Bernie Sanders endorses Hillary Clinton for president https://t.co/H31VCqESK8

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) July 12, 2016

“I have come here to make it as clear as possible as to why I am endorsing Hillary Clinton,” Sanders said at an event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

“This campaign is not really about Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. This campaign is about the needs of the American people and addressing the very serious crises that we face,” Sanders added. “And there is no doubt in my mind that as we head into November, Hillary Clinton is far and away the best candidate to do that.”

Sanders supporters now have a decision to make. Will they vote for Clinton in November?

It will prove difficult, if not impossible to reconcile Clinton’s deep Wall Street connections and Sanders’ “revolution.”

Sanders and Clinton, however, are not serious ideological rivals.

NBC News reports:

Never as ideologically pure as his stereotype suggests, Sanders backed Clinton’s health reform plan when he was a congressman in the 1990s, even though it fell far short of his favored single payer plan.

He appeared on stage with her at a event supporting the effort in Vermont. “Thanks for your commitment to real health care access for all Americans,” Clinton hand wrote underneath a photo of the two of them from 1993.

They overlapped in the Senate for only two years, but it was enough time to serve together on the Health Committee and team up some legislation, including successful green jobs training legislation dubbed The Sanders-Clinton amendment.

Clinton donated $10,000 to help Sanders get elected to the Senate, through a PAC. And he praised her as “one of the brightest people in Congress” when Obama chose her to be secretary of state.

The Washington Post mentions what has become a habitual knee-jerk reaction on the part of both Democrat and Republican voters.

“Bernie Sanders voters will support Hillary Clinton en masse—while holding their noses,” the newspaper headlined on July 8.

The Post cites a Pew poll revealing 85 percent of Sanders backers will support Clinton.

Others are not so sure. The results of a Bloomberg poll posted on June 22 shows 55 percent of Bernie supporters will not vote for Clinton.

“Conversations with two dozen Sanders supporters revealed a lingering distrust of Clinton as too establishment-friendly, hawkish or untrustworthy. As some Sanders fans see it, the primary was not a simple preference for purity over pragmatism, but a moral choice between an honest figure and someone whom they consider fundamentally corrupted by the ways of Washington. Sanders has fed these perceptions throughout his campaign, which is one reason he’s having a hard time coming around to an endorsement,” Bloomberg noted.

Now that Sanders has officially endorsed Clinton, the numbers will likely flip despite widespread dislike and mistrust of Clinton.

Carroll Quigley:

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.

Quigley’s commentary is especially relevant in regard to intra-party politics.

Bernie Sanders should have never joined the Democrat party. It was a foregone conclusion the establishment would eat him alive and he would betray his loyal supporters.

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