Pete Buttigieg was a company man to the end. With no path forward for his campaign, and recognizing that staying in the race could only help Bernie Sanders win big on Super Tuesday, Buttigieg yesterday ended his bid for the Democratic nomination on the grounds of “responsibility.”

“We have a responsibility to consider the effect of remaining in this race any further,” he told supporters in South Bend last night.

The message wasn’t hard to decipher. Buttigieg had used his distant third-place speech in Nevada to attack Sanders for promoting an “inflexible, ideological revolution” and bringing a “tenor of combat and division and polarization.” These attacks were paired by Buttigieg with some mild red-baiting in the last Democratic debate, warning that Sanders was too radical to win, and, at one point, obnoxiously babbling over Sanders’s entire reply.