Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders will formally declare an end to their political rivalry Tuesday, a moment that couldn’t come quickly enough for the former secretary of state trying to unite Democrats against Donald Trump.
Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, hopes to rev up voters on the left with help from Sanders. The 74-year-old self-described democratic socialist excited the liberal base and won young voters by large margins.
The joint rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is a start in putting to rest Democratic fears of a political nightmare scenario: that Sanders might sit on his hands in the general election — or worse, run as a third-party candidate on the left.
Clinton aides are confident that Sanders could be the former secretary of state’s most potent weapon against Trump.
Trump has sought to appeal to Sanders supporters, saying he better represents Americans angry at the political establishment than Clinton does. Clinton sees Sanders as someone who can capture those who might be attracted to Trump, especially in states he won such as New Hampshire, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Tuesday’s event is the byproduct of weeks of conversations between Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, and Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ top and most trusted aide.
What Bernie’s Progressive Backers Say He Has Accomplished
Bernie Sanders is expected to endorse Hillary Clinton at a joint event in New Hampshire later this morning, almost a month after the last votes in the Democratic Party’s primary were cast.
The Vermont Senator won 22 states, received more than 12 million votes, and guaranteed that Clinton campaigned for the nomination until the very end. During interviews with ABC News, Sanders’ biggest backers said they were confident that the senator’s prolonged candidacy, and refusal not to bow out even weeks after Clinton became the party’s presumptive nominee, would not dent his legacy.
“It is hard for me to take that kind of talk seriously. We’re talking about a political establishment that has never once understood Bernie Sanders or the movement,” Charles Chamberlain, Executive Director of Democracy for America, told ABC News. “Sanders understands the movement he is leading and he knows that he needs to make sure that our people are going to show up to the polls in November. We need to have the time to work with the Clintons to get the party platform changes that we need and heal from the primary before we just flip a switch.”
When asked to reflect on what the lasting legacy of the Sanders campaign might be, the senator’s first congressional endorser, Arizona’s Raul Grijalva, got a little teary-eyed. “A little bit of passion, a lot of emotion and chipping at the rock,” he said of his colleague. “It behooves our party to understand that you can’t poll-test sincerity and it behooves our party to understand that you can’t super-PAC sincerity.” [….]
According to the Sanders campaign, over 15,000 people expressed interest on their website in running for office after the senator said last month said he hoped to continue his movement by backing progressives around the country and encouraging his supporters to run.
“We have built this massive infrastructure of people across the country who are going to continue to fight and work for change,” said Larry Cohen, former president of the Communications Workers of America and who has been working with the senator’s campaign.
Sanders’ Philosophical Victory
The news that Bernie Sanders will appear alongside Hillary Clinton at a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Tuesday shouldn’t surprise anyone, except perhaps the most deluded “Bernie or bust” types. For months now, the Vermont senator has been declaring that he will do everything he can to defeat Donald Trump in November’s election, which is clearly a coded way of saying that he will endorse the Democratic candidate when he feels that the time is right.
But Sanders, despite his reputation as a left-wing purist (at least by American standards), is also a canny politician, and he never said that his recommendation would come cheap. To the fury of many Clinton supporters, he has been holding off on offering his endorsement for more than a month now, since the primary season effectively ended, on June 7th. These delaying tactics appear to have worked.
In order to win over Sanders and his supporters, the Clinton campaign has made policy concessions in a number of areas, including education, the minimum wage, and the death penalty. It would be going too far to say that the runner-up in the primaries is dictating policy; on trade, fracking, and some other issues, the Clinton campaign appears to have stood firm and rejected demands by Sanders and his supporters. But the deal that Sanders and Clinton have struck will shift the Democratic Party further away from the centrist, New Democrat philosophy that Bill Clinton campaigned on in 1992, and closer to the social democratic, or “New Deal liberal,” approach that Sanders has long promoted.
The most visible sign of this shift came last week, when Clinton said that she would make tuition free at state colleges and universities for any student whose family isn’t in the top fifteen per cent of the income distribution. Although some details of the Clinton proposal differed from the vision that Sanders laid out during the Democratic primaries, the thrust was the same. In the words of the headline that ran above a critical editorial in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, “Free College, Dude!”
Bernie Is Raising Too Much Money
It appears Bernie Sanders, he of the famed $27 donation, is still struggling to rein in over-eager donors. On Sunday, the Federal Elections Commission sent the Sanders campaign a list of contributors who may have donated more than $2,700, the maximum amount allowed for a primary campaign. It runs on for more than 1,000 pages.
This is the fifth time Sanders has been put on notice, and each time, the list of flagged contributions has grown. In February, the FEC’s letter was just 95 pages long. By April, it had hit 650 pages, and the FEC’s letter for May—which was also filed Sunday, a bit late—reached 778. While it’s hard to pin down exactly how much money Sanders might have to return, a rough calculation—the total amount donated by the cited contributors minus the legal limit for each—indicates it could be in the neighborhood of $500,000, a relatively small sum for a campaign that’s raised nearly $230 million.
As Russell Berman wrote in May, these notices don’t mean the Sanders campaign has done anything illegal. It’s more likely a symptom of his quick and unexpected rise—the donations flooded in before the Vermont senator had the infrastructure in place to handle them. Yes, Hillary Clinton hasn’t had this problem, but she’s more experienced—and more reliant on big-money bundlers, who collect donations from like-minded friends and are intimately familiar with campaign finance law.
How Bernie ‘Won’ By Waiting
From free college to a tax on carbon emissions, Sanders has managed to finesse some of his liberal policies into the Democratic Party’s platform and cajole Clinton’s campaign into accepting some of his most liberal proposals. Weeks of backroom and telephone negotiations resulted in Sanders-backed policy ideas landing on Clinton’s platform and in the Democratic Party’s blueprint, outlined in a hefty platform draft that was finished last weekend in Orlando.
Sanders’ moderate successes brings him to Portsmouth on Tuesday with something of the swagger of a victor, despite failing by a long shot at his biggest goal of winning the nomination.
“We have made enormous strides,” Sanders boasted in a statement to reporters two days before his expected endorsement for Clinton. “Thanks to the millions of people across the country who got involved in the political process — many for the first time — we now have the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party.”
Sanders’ endorsement will be billed as a unity moment in the Democratic Party when its two wings — the Vermont Senator’s and Clinton’s — come together in an effort to defeat Donald Trump. Sanders, famously stubborn, would likely not give Clinton a full-throated backing without major concessions.
But Sanders’ coyness in endorsing Clinton may have paid off. By not withholding his endorsement, he pulled Clinton to the table. After all, Sanders could only ever endorse Clinton and help her win the White House if he really agreed with her platform. “We believe we got at least 80% of what we’ve been fighting for,” said Warren Gunnels, Sanders’ top policy adviser.
And by pushing the ideas into the Democratic bloodstream, Sanders may yet see some of them enacted, although it could be years from now.
Sanders Pushes The Party To The Left (But Not Clinton)
“We have made enormous strides,” Sanders said in a statement after the party voted on platform amendments at a meeting in Orlando. “Thanks to the millions of people across the country who got involved in the political process – many for the first time – we now have the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party.”
That’s true; the platform – which still needs to be ratified at the convention – calls for Wall Street reform, repealing the ban on using federal funds for abortions, and having the Justice Department “investigate all questionable or suspicious police-involved shootings.” But that doesn’t mean that the party’s presidential nominee supports all of the progressive principals articulated in the 15,000-word document. The meetings on Friday and Saturday dragged on for hours, and NBC News reports that while representatives for Clinton and Sanders were trying to find common ground, at times things got heated. Points of disagreement included:
The Minimum Wage: In a big win for Sanders, the platform adopts his call for raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, and indexing it to inflation. Clinton wants to raise the federal minimum wage to $12, butsupports local campaigns to raise the minimum wage to $15 in cities such as Los Angeles and New York.
The Death Penalty: Democrats are set to become the first major U.S. political party to call for the abolition of capital punishment. Sanders is against the death penalty in all cases, but Clinton has taken a more complicated stance. She has said she thinks it is “too frequently applied, and too often in a discriminatory way,” but believes it should still be an option “for particularly heinous crimes in the federal system, like terrorism.”
Marijuana Legalization: The platform says “we encourage the federal government to remove marijuana from its list as a Class 1 Federal Controlled Substance, providing a reasoned pathway for future legalization.” The plank, which marks the first time marijuana has made an appearance in the platform, was opposed by many Clinton delegates and won by just one vote. Clinton supports medical marijuana, but is opposed to legalizing pot across the board. Sanders backed state-by-state legalization efforts.
Why Sanders And Corbyn Keep Confounding The Elite Experts
Comparisons between Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn are nothing new. Both are idiosyncratic, outsider social democrats—“grumpy old socialists” some say — who’ve risen to prominence representing popular views abandoned by elites, particularly elites of the institutional center-left parties in each of their countries. Both were seen as fringe candidates when they first stepped forward last year and elites just can’t wait to re-marginalize them again — but that may not be so easy, both because of who they are and because of what they represent.
Comparisons first kicked into gear when Corbyn won election as Labour leader, naturally gaining Sanders’ congratulation, though naysayers were commonplace, even then. Then, when Sanders won the New Hampshire primary, comparisons intensified—their supporters, for one thing, were strikingly similar. There were dissenting voices, but the broad similarities were so striking that even Tony Blair couldn’t help but notice them, professing bafflement, leading Guardian commentator Deborah Orr to respond:
Tony Blair says he is “baffled” by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders because of “the question of electability”. For him, these choices are simply not pragmatic. No matter what fine ideas candidates may espouse, for Blair the key matter is whether they can achieve power. Not that he thinks Corbyn and Sanders are exactly brimming with fine ideas: “Free tuition fees: well, that’s great,” he says. “But someone’s going to have pay for it.”
But the answer, of course, is obvious. Pragmatism itself doesn’t seem terribly pragmatic any longer. Pragmatism, as practised by Blair, ended in disaster, despite the supposed cleverness of its compromises. [….]
Yes, Sanders and Corbyn are unlikely leaders, precisely because the entire elite leadership structures have lost their way, leaving a void that only unlikely outsiders could fill. The elite dysfunction that gave rise to them isn’t going away, even if they could get rid of Sanders and Corbyn overnight. But the mass desire for a functioning democracy — one that actually meets people’s needs — isn’t going anywhere either. That’s the real significance of Sanders and Corbyn—they’ve helped rekindle that desire.
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