The platform will be as it is leaving Orlando.
Early this morning, before Bernie Sanders made his big speech endorsing Hillary Clinton today in New Hampshire, Sanders’s top policy adviser, Warren Gunnels, sent an email to a few dozen fellow Sanders supporters.
“The Senator made the difficult decision not to file minority reports,” Gunnels wrote in the email, which was sent to all of Sanders’s representatives on the Democratic convention Platform Committee and forwarded to this blog. “You should be receiving an e-mail soon from the Senator about the next steps in the political revolution.”
This dry language actually amounts to a very significant declaration: What it means is that the Sanders campaign will not further contest the makeup of the Democratic platform at the convention, even though Sanders did not get all the changes to the platform he had hoped for. Previously, the Sanders campaign had intimated that — even after he endorsed Clinton — it would file minority reports indicating his disagreement with various aspects of the Dem platform, which could have perhaps led to continuing disillusionment among his 13 million voters, whom Clinton very much wants to win over starting now.
snip
Rather than stoke further divisions over policy at the convention — which could be counter-productive — Sanders and his people are pocketing their meaningful victories and moving to the next step. In other words, the best hope for converting the Sanders movement into lasting influence is to channel it into electing Democrats to the White House and Congress, and, crucially into putting pressure on them, once in office, to move in the direction of the movement’s priorities. (As the email indicates there could still be potential fights over rules governing future nomination processes, but those will be more procedural in nature.)
WaPo: The Plum Line
The political revolution continues.