No one would mistake me for a Sanders fanboy but clearly he has significant support, and quite frankly many of his supporters seem to be more motivated than any other supporters I know of with the possible exception of Rand Paul.

I am not claiming Sanders has majority support or that he is the favorite.  But Hillary has to be very careful.  She already has the rep in some places of thinking she is entitled to the nomination.  Lots of polls indicate she has weak support in groups where Sanders is strong.  If Hillary antagonizes these groups with a heavy handed effort against Sanders they may well stay home in the general.

Another consideration is that I am not sure Hillary has complete control.  There has been speculation some of Sanders minions could be criminally charged for their actions.  It is unclear to me if, from a legal standpoint, the DNC or Hillary or someone else is the vic; who really owns the database.  But more importantly who would make the decision to file criminal charges.  Does the DNC have to contact the controlling legal authority (and just who is the controlling legal authority) or can they act on their own?

As for appearance, well that's in the eye of the beholder. I certainly think Trump is the weirdest, ugliest looking of all the candidates, but his popularity is sky high with the GOP base.

Funny times, eh?

Blurb from the story from Sanders' minions:

"Weaver also suggested the DNC was likely to settle the case because they were afraid of what might come out in the discovery process of the legal proceedings.

"We will get access to all the internal communications of the DNC where we can demonstrate what I think most people think is going on, which is that there are some people in there who are clearly trying to help the Clinton campaign," he said."

Blurb from the story from Clinton's minions"

"But a few hours after the matter was resolved, Fallon put out a statement highlighting the fact that the Sanders campaign had "agreed to submit to an independent audit to determine the full extent of the intrusion."

"We believe this audit should proceed immediately, and, pending its findings, we expect further disciplinary action to be taken as appropriate," he said"

I am having flashbacks and not in a good way.  

A timeline  (my bold)

On Wednesday morning, NGP VAN applied a new software patch to the DNC's voter database system, and because of an error in the code, users were capable of accessing some limited, yet extremely valuable information belonging to other campaigns for a very brief window of time. Even though the glitch opened access, users still needed to take deliberate steps to seek out such information.

For those who think that, oh it was just open and of course any staffer from any campaign would look - kind of like taking advantage if you got higher access to research service you pay for personally.

As a result of this analysis, NGP VAN found that campaign staff on the Sanders campaign, including the campaign's national data director, had accessed proprietary information about which voters were being targeted by the Clinton campaign -- and in doing so violated their agreements with the DNC. These staffers then saved this information in their personal folders on the system, and over the course of the next day, we learned that at least one staffer appeared to have generated reports and exported them from the system.

None of this is in dispute. It's fully documented in the system logs. And these details reveal nothing less than a serious violation of the agreements governing the use of this data. Underscoring that fact is the point that the Sanders campaign has fired their national data director and indicated further disciplinary actions may be taken pending the results of their own investigation.

Breach of contract goes both ways.

This:

no one's going to take a chance and actually hand him the keys to the office of the Commander in Chief.