Jon Ralston has long-been known as Nevada’s leading political observer, tough, smart and fair:
Ralston, who projects an affable, workaday vibe behind the desk, combines intellectual mettle and a hyper-awareness of the political landscape, to produce a show that challenges politicians of all stripes. He’s got a keen concern for the actual people who actually live in Nevada and doesn’t indulge himself with pointless mystification of the political process.
If you want to know more about Ralston and the way he thinks, I commend you to this interview in the Columbia Journalism Review.
The reason I am starting this diary out talking about Ralston is that it is important to understand that he is no unknown partisan hack. That’s because his article on the Nevada Convention is not a he-said/she-said article like most political news articles. Refreshingly — given that reality is not always even-handed — it takes a side.
Ralston’s account straightforwardly lays the blame for what happened at the Convention virtually 100% on the Sanders campaign and supporters. The Democratic Party, according to Ralston, did nothing at all wrong or unusual, and the riot resulted from misinformation deliberately fed to Sanders supporters, led by Congressional candidate Erin Bilbray and Sanders organizer Angi Morelli, who patrolled the area with megaphones, and abetted by numerous social media conduits in an intentional and organized effort to disrupt the convention.
Sanders, who had national campaign operatives on the floor at the Paris, has yet to comment on the near-riot his local operatives enabled as they poured gas on a fire that started with a lawsuit against the party and ignited after arguments about rules, voice votes and rejected delegates.
Despite their social media frothing and self-righteous screeds, the facts reveal that the Sanders folks disregarded rules, then when shown the truth, attacked organizers and party officials as tools of a conspiracy to defraud the senator of what was never rightfully his in the first place. Instead of acknowledging they were out-organized by a Clinton campaign chastened by county convention results and reanimated to cement the caucus numbers at the Paris, the Sanders folks have decided to cry conflagration in a crowded building, without regard to what they burn down in the process.
Considering the organized nature of the provision of misinformation to Sanders delegates, it seems likely that a bloc of Sanders supporters, possibly including some low-level Sanders Campaign employees, planned the disruption before the Convention started, explaining why so many Sanders supporters are pointing to the same misconstrued events and making the same false arguments. Apparently the Sanders supporters were led to believe that a routine vote to accept the temporary rules — rules that had been promulgated unanimously by a committee with 5 Clinton supporters and 5 Sanders supporters, and with co-chairs from each campaign — was in fact a vote to reject a group of Sanders delegates.
This central source of misinformation has promulgated at least two universally-repeated arguments for how the Party “cheated” Sanders. Both are false:
- The vote to accept the temporary rules was held at 9:30 a.m. but the convention started at 10.
- The rules were changed to reject Sanders delegates.
I will deal with these pieces of misinformation one at a time.
The Convention started at 9:00 a.m.
This was not a secret. Here is the official Convention Call, sent to all delegates. At the very top, in large letters, was this information:
2016 STATE CONVENTION CALL
SATURDAY, MAY 14, 2016 – 9:00 AM
PARIS LAS VEGAS
3655 SOUTH LAS VEGAS BOULEVARD LAS VEGAS, NV 89109
Delegates were allowed to check in and be admitted to the floor as late as 10 a.m., but there is no ambiguity about the starting time of the convention, and anyone who was not on the floor by 9:30 a.m. — ½ hour after the official Convention starting time — has no grounds for complaint over the fact that a routine vote was held before they arrived.
The rule that rejected Sanders’ delegates had long been in place and was well-publicized.
And it’s a very obvious rule, almost certainly followed by all or nearly all states. It was announced in the same pre-convention mailing to all delegates, which included the Rules of the 2016 Nevada State Democratic Convention. The very first rule in the book reads as follows:
Rule 1a: All delegates and alternates to the state convention must be registered Democrats residing in the county for which they are representing at the convention.
The exact same information also appeared in the Convention Call as the very first statement under General Provisions:
II. GENERAL PROVISIONS All Delegates and Alternates to the State Convention must be registered Democrats residing in the county they are representing at the convention.
Whoever organized this is still out there . . . organizing. I’m sure most of you have seen these coordinated lies. I have little doubt that these individuals have big plans for Philadelphia.
I hope that Sanders orders an investigation into his campaign and removes the bad apples. Since I am not confident that will happen, I hope they may be thoroughly discredited before that date. As for right now, I just hope that nobody buys the lies.