The day I met Hillary Clinton was a rough day for her campaign.
At the end of my junior year of college in 2008, I was offered an intern position with the field campaign of Hillary Clinton for President. I worked with my professors to finish my exams early and leave my home in Central Florida to hit the campaign trail. I travelled through the country, first to D.C., then to Southern Indiana, and lastly to South Dakota for the final primaries to be held on June 3, 2008.
The 2008 Democratic Presidential primary stands out in my memory as being especially brutal. There was a very significant and venomous animosity between the two camps, something that was deeply bitter in a way the contest this year has not been. Many of us in the Clinton camp had expected token opposition in the primary, expecting an historic female Presidential candidacy, only to find ourselves thrown out on our ears by an African-American candidate whose middle name was Hussein. To say President Barack Obama was a surprise is to criminally understate the awesome nature of his success.
The bad blood ran very, very deep and didn’t even really begin to abate until well after the Democratic convention. Even after the primaries in Indiana and North Carolina effectively dashed any hopes we had for a major shift in momentum—one that I felt was in the winds, as the Clinton campaign really found its voice and its footing in the last few weeks of the primaries—the acerbic nature of relations between the two teams had me believing that we would “go all the way to the convention,” much as Bernie Sanders says he will do now.
There are many people who are irked by Senator Sanders conduct, and despite being a dyed-in-the-wool Clintonista, I have very much respect for him, his campaign, and his position. A campaign that does not have any path of any kind to victory is a dead campaign, and for all the things that Senator Sanders campaign is, it’s certainly not dead yet. Senator Sanders has an obligation to himself, his team, to his loved ones and supporters and even to the American people to keep his campaign alive for every single second it possibly can. That is how we do things in the Democratic Party: we finish what we start.
On May 23, 2008, I was driving one of the big, black, American SUVs in Hillary Clinton’s motorcade as we sped around the Sioux Falls, South Dakota area. It’s one of my proudest days of my life. Then-Senator Clinton was at the end of a long, brutal slog of a primary, a bit rougher for the wear but as determined and committed to do good for the American people as ever. In an interview with the Argus Leader, South Dakota’s largest newspaper, she was asked why there was so much pressure on her to withdraw from the race and gave a response which included a reference to Bobby Kennedy’s tragic assassination in June of 1968.
The primary had been so heated for so long that this comment was quickly framed as Hillary Clinton hoping that Barack Obama would be assassinated, that she was stoking fear that Barack Obama would be killed for being black, or even encouraging an unstable individual to take such action. All these things are of course entirely absurd, and while her response certainly left much to be desired, the intense vilification of Hillary Clinton was as powerful as ever. It is ever-present, and it is neither made more nor less intense by Senator Sanders’ campaign.
Hillary Clinton will be our nominee, but she is certainly strong enough to stay standing in the face of much worse PR than whatever Senator Sanders will throw at her. I remember that on June 3, 2008, I was so intensely glad that she did not concede for many reasons, and even if Senator Sanders does not concede immediately following the primaries, that is his prerogative. Were there more substantial policy difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, perhaps trying to leverage her 18 million votes from that campaign in Denver would have been a worthwhile cause.
But as a supporter of Hillary Clinton and a veteran of the 2008 campaign, I find it hugely inconsistent to pressure Senator Sanders to concede before the campaign is over. I find it disrespectful to expect that he should walk away from all that he has accomplished before he absolutely has to. And I think that the millions of people who voted for Bernie deserve to be heard. As the sun sets on the 2016 Democratic Presidential primary, we need to come together to accomplish the goals and support the causes that we share and believe in, and they are too many and too great for us to remain at odds when we start cleaning up the balloons in Philadelphia.
When I met Hillary Clinton on the tarmac of the Sioux Falls airport just before she boarded her plane, I knew she had had a rough day. There will always be bad PR days for Hillary Clinton. But she is so much bigger than that, so much stronger than any single election or contest, and that’s why I urge my fellow supporters to follow her lead, and let Senator Sanders and his supporters complete their campaign in the manner of his choosing.