Have you heard about Mike the Headless Chicken? This is a true story. Mike’s owner, a Colorado farmer, cut his head off in September 1945. But somehow Mike didn’t get the memo that he was dead. He lived another 18 months, earning the nickname Miracle Mike, before toppling over in 1947.

I thought of Mike last night as I watched DOA candidate Bernie Sanders sustain his purity shtick in what will blessedly be the last Democratic presidential debate.

Joe Biden has buried Bernie in the nomination race. Bernie can wobble around for a while longer, fueled by ego and his dead dreams, but we all know it’s over. He has lost 15 of the last 20 contests, and indeed, Joe had a great line last night: “I didn’t have any money and I still won.” Bernie will lose again tomorrow night, most notably in delegate-rich Florida, and the hope is that he’ll finally get the message that the party he has never joined does not want him. Democratic primary voters said it again in the latest NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll: Joe, 61 percent; Bernie, 32.

The gist of last night’s debate: Joe focused on the here and now. Bernie focused on Senate votes that Joe took 25 or 30 years ago.

To which I ask: What voter in America (besides the Bernie Bros, who haven’t even turned out for their icon) gives a flying frick whether Joe passed or failed Bernie’s purity test 25 or 30 years ago?

Joe focused on the coronavirus crisis – “We need unprecedented action right now to deal with the unprecedented crisis” – and listed the steps he’d take, the steps he laid out in meticulous detail on his campaign site. He was crisp, concise and, all told, presidential in his bearing. Bernie echoed him, but he predictably tacked on his all-government health care plan (the one without any price tag, or any hope of getting passed) as the ultimate cure-all.

To which Joe said: “People are looking for results, not a revolution. They want to deal with the results they need right now…(Let’s) respond to the immediate needs we have now. First things first.”

But Bernie preferred (for the umpteenth time) to time travel back to the ’90s, ’80s, and ’70s, when (in his telling) Joe was an implacable foe of Social Security. One of Bernie’s ads says that Joe “has advocated cutting Social Security for 40 years,” which is basically a lie, according to nonpartisan fact-checkers. One of Bernie’s newsletters says that in 2018, Joe “lauded” conservative House Speaker Paul Ryan “for proposing cuts to Social Security,” which is totally a lie.

Yeah, there were a few times over the last 40 years when Joe wanted temporary freezes or temporary trims, but what Bernie failed to acknowledge (and it would’ve been great if Joe had said this) is that no Democratic president is going to slash Social Security. Nobody thinks that would happen – certainly not the senior primary voters who’ve already spurned Bernie en masse. Indeed (as Joe did point out), it’s Donald Trump who recently proposed Social Security cuts.

Anyway, Joe finally had enough of Bernie’s dash down memory lane. If Bernie really wanted to argue about the past, let’s remember that “this man voted against the Brady (gun reform) bill five times – background checks, background checks – five times.” And Bernie “voted to exempt the gun industry from being able to be sued. Talk about a special interest…We cannot sue the gun manufacturers.”

Bernie had no answer for any of that.

Joe refocused the dialogue. The urgent issue right now – the only thing that Americans care about right now, in the wake of the coronavirus crisis – is: “What do we do from this point on?” In his words, “the existential threat to the United States of America is Donald Trump…The character of the nation is on the ballot” – and that alone should be enough to unite mainstream Democrats and non-Democratic progressives.

Joe, in a bid for unity, has actually moved left lately on several fronts: endorsing a version of Bernie’s free college plan and Elizabeth Warren’s bankruptcy plan (forgiving student debt). Joe is a politician, after all, and I don’t mean that in the pejorative sense. That’s how coalitions are built. Franklin D. Roosevelt is a sainted Democrat today (Bernie invokes him), but in his time he was crafty politician who moved left only when he felt it was politically prudent or necessary to do so.

Hopefully, Joe’s olive branches will give Bernie political cover to stand down. Or perhaps another ballot shellacking, tomorrow night, will do the trick. Not even Miracle Mike could run around headless forever.