Oregon’s Jeff Merkley, (D. Antifa) announced Tuesday that he will not run for President of the United States.

Reaction was swift:

Had he thrown his black balaclava into the ring Merkley would have become the 15th candidate running on the Leftist side of the political aisle. The slate of Democrats/Socialists who have announced so far is: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, Jay Inslee, John Hickenlooper, Julián Castro, Tulsi Gabbard, John Delaney, Pete Buttigieg, Andrew Yang, Marianne Williamson. More, such as Joe Biden, Beto O’Rourke and others are still coyly hanging back. Hillary Clinton and former Attorney General Eric Holder announced yesterday that they would not run for office.

Merkley released his announcement on Twitter to avid supporters.

The 62-year-old former Princeton and Stanford student told them of his family’s hardscrabble upbringing, including a story – “family lore” – that his grandmother slept in a boxcar of a train for a short time.

Merkley’s name recognition might have been an issue in his now-erstwhile run for president. Few people know who he is. However, Oregon’s ‘Accidental Senator’ keeps the door open to a Cabinet position with a Bernie Sanders Administration. It’s clear that Jay Inslee (he’s Washington State’s Governor and also running for president) has the inside track to become Sanders’s “green czar” and is said to be preparing his first ‘five year plan’ for the demise of the U.S. capitalist economy, using the Alexandria Ocasio Cortez “Green New Deal” as his blueprint.

So, the world says goodbye to a possible Merkley presidency, remote though it may have been. Oregonians are lamenting a missed opportunity to get rid of him from the U.S. Senate and now Jeff Merkley will go back to obscurity.