Bernie Sanders needs to do the right thing.

If he wants to continue to run, God bless him.

But if he wants to run on the trope that there’s no difference between Hillary Clinton and any of her possible GOP opponents, then he’s doing the country and his supporters a grave injustice.

As to his complaints about independents being unable to vote for him in New York, that’s really a self-indictment of his own incompetence. The rules were there for all to see; he should have warned his supporters months ago about the voting rules in New York. That his campaign failed to do so doesn’t speak to his ability to assemble a competent economic team, a competent foreign policy team, or a competent cabinet.

One has to wonder whether a President Sanders response to other unnoticed realities — in the Middle East, in Russia, or in Congress — would be more whining about fairness.

It’s no secret that this country has serious problems — and that the future of our youth is imperiled by the income inequality that Sanders has so effectively brought to the public conversation.

But Sanders had better let his youthful supporters know that he isn’t the only answer to their problems, that there are other people — lots of them — with opposing views that must be taken into consideration, and that politics is the art of dealmaking between opponents, or it’s about pure power, which history tells us always ends badly.