For more than a year, the party that is supposed to be the beacon of justice in politics has descended into the very thing many of us have been fighting against. On the cusp of the Democratic National Convention, it is time to remind everyone about how some establishment Democrats lied, cheated, and stole their way to a Clinton nomination this year, and how they are not even trying to do anything but punish dissent at this juncture. The resulting pyrrhic victory is going to hurt our party and progress not just in this election, but for years to come.
I have been a loyal Democrats for many years. Paul Wellstone brought me in and gave me hope that this could be the party that truly cared about fairness, equality, justice, and reform. Where most people pay lip service to the party, I have fought in the trenches, often in the reddest parts of the reddest states for our party (even had someone threaten to pull his sidearm on me), have actively tried to recruit new activists to expand our party, and in recent years have volunteered over 1,000 hours per year for the cause. The corruption, collusion, lies, fear mongering, hate peddling, and tilting of the scales by some powerful establishment Democrats over the last year has shaken my faith in our party to the core, and while I still feel it is salvageable, I am not optimistic and feel like progressives are being chased out of our party.
There are a myriad of ways that this victory for the insider candidate burnt bridges. While I cannot go into each in depth, many will be touched on here.
How The Nomination Contest Went Down
For starters, the recent #DNCemail dump by Wikileaks demonstrates an undeniable scheme to tilt the scales for Clinton from the start.
The DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz completely rigged the entire debate schedule to kill the chances of any Clinton competitors. Something Martin O’Malley succinctly pointed out at the DNC in Minneapolis last Summer (scroll to 4:20):
While DWS has finally agreed to step down as DNC Chair, this should have happened at least by last Summer if not after the 2014 debacle. She was favoring the candidate who she used to be the co-Campaign Chair for.
And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Never before in the history of our party have so many insiders lined up so early to back a candidate in an open contest. 20% of the total delegates required for the party nomination were openly pledging loyalty to Clinton a year ago, and those that wanted to side with someone else were sternly warned against it, and consequently punished. Attacking dissent is the antithesis of the principles of our party.
Then there was the collusion between state parties and the DNC with the Clinton campaign. Big money by mega-rich donors was literally funneled through state parties to the DNC to be spent to help Clinton. How can outsiders and non-Democrats trust our words seeking campaign finance reform when our party was guilty of so blatantly bending the rules to rake in big money from the oligarchy?
During the primary contests, I was horrified at how many of my fellow Democrats were turning a blind eye to the voter suppression at play. There were voter roll purges, a sharp closing of polling locations, ridiculously overcrowded causus sites, long lines, leaked calls of early Clinton wins designed to get Bernie supporters to leave, closed primaries with far too early registration deadlines, etc. New York for instance had a party affiliation change deadline almost half a year before their primary resulting in millions being shut out. That’s what Republicans do, not Democrats.
I wrote about the shocking number of false accusations against Bernie last October in my diary 25 Unfounded Myths Being Spread About Bernie. Little did I know that it would only get much, much worse from there.
Establishment Democrats' Quest For “Unity”?
Bernie is a racist
Bernie is a sexist
Bernie is anti-immigrant
Bernie is a SOCIALIST!!!
Bernie championed Wall Street deregulation that caused the Great Recession
Bernie is against all Democrats
Bernie is unqualified to be President
Bernie’s progressive proposals are unrealistic, pie in the sky
Bernie caused the Sandy Hook massacre
Bernie supports the Minutement hate group
Bernie wants to take away your Obamacare, start over
Bernie hates Obama
Bernie opposed LGBT rights
Bernie supported the indefinite detention of immigrants
Bernie is a gun nut NRA lover
Bernie doesn’t help down ballot Democrats
Bernie would add $20 trillion to the national debt
Bernie’s plan to break up the big banks would crash the economy
Bernie is a one issue candidate
Bernie is a misogynist
Bernie can’t compromise or get things done
Bernie doesn’t have enough experience
Bernie is too old
Bernie is hated by his colleagues
Bernie fantasizes about raping women
Bernie's diplomacy instead of warmongering is weak
Bernie’s wife is fat
Bernie doesn’t appeal to any minorities
Bernie faked pictures of himself at Civil Rights protests
Bernie is beholden to big oil money
Bernie wanted to ship of nuclear waste to a poor latino community in Texas
Bernie’s supporters are all naive young white males in caucus states
Bernie is not electable
Bernie entered into joint fundraising pacts too and took Wall Street money
Bernie’s tone is negative
Bernie is a liar
Bernie is a McCarthyite
Bernie would make poverty worse
Bernie is just in this for the money/ego
Bernie’s call for a $15 minimum wage would kill jobs
Bernie is anti-abortion
Bernie’s tuition free public university plan would kill black colleges
Bernie has never been vetted during his 34 years in public office
Bernie hasn’t been attacked yet
The Democratic National Convention
Then, once the nomination had been virtually secured, establishment Democrats didn’t stop there. They could have started reaching out and trying to unify, but chose instead to punish dissenters and reward Clinton’s strictest loyalists.
They were so uber-generous that allowed Bernie Sanders to suggest 5 members in the DNC Platform committee of 15 members, even though Bernie won 46% of the pledged delegates despite all the odds. This was only one committee and the others were stacked by and chaired by Clinton loyalists who often attacked Bernie and this movement the hardest. Even the platform committee rejected most of the progressive proposals in a series of 7-6 votes. Even rejecting the horrible Trans-Pacific Partnership was not passed, even though Clinton herself supposedly is “against” it (I use quotes because it was never a campaign issue, never clarified why she claimed to be against it, and there was no lobbying of members of Congress who endorsed her to change their votes to oppose it).
Then the list of speakers for the Democratic National Convention was released. Except for Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders, every other speaker on the list is a staunch Clinton loyalist.
Clinton could have also tried to reach out by selecting a progressive as her Vice President, but once again, we see a clear shift to the right as she picked the anti-choice Tim Kaine, someone that makes Joe Lieberman look decent by comparison.
While there are dozens more examples, this entire process has been an exercise in winning at any cost, and it has turned off so many people from our party that we are now in very serious trouble, both in the POTUS contest and in down ballot races. So many potential Democratic voters have been so disgusted by what transpired that even if Bernie Sanders got down on his hands and knees and begged them, they will not support Clinton or many establishment Democrats at this point.
A Bernie Sanders nomination could have been the best thing that could happen to the Democratic Party since FDR built the New Deal coalition, but establishment Democrats instead chose to burn bridges in a quest for a pyrrhic victory.