Rosie DiManno
Sanders’ supporters had their moment. It’s time to face their real enemy,
An old white guy, stirring passions that have already riven the Democratic convention: Bernie or Bust.
It’s been a bust, of course, that relatively small — estimated at 10 per cent — rump of supporters which continues to carry the standard for Bernie Sanders, even as Hillary Clinton was formally nominated Tuesday as her party’s presidential candidate.
But they certainly made a noisy mash of it in Philadelphia, jeering even their adored Sanders when he did the honourable — if hypocritical — thing by unequivocally endorsing his primaries rival.
“What we must do or forever look back in regret is to beat Donald Trump and elect Hillary Clinton,” he beseeched from the stage. “In my view, it’s too easy to boo, but it is harder to look your kids in the face who would be living under a Donald Trump presidency.”
Do the clamorous dissidents even realize that Sanders, who hails from a state, Vermont, that is almost 97-per-cent white, came very late and without much enthusiasm to the singularly most incendiary issue in the U.S. in the past year — the killing of black men by law enforcement and an attendant explosion of old racial rancour?
Does it not matter — as well it should to any Democrat — that Sanders, representing a fiercely gun-friendly state, voted against the Brady Bill in 1993, objecting to its imposition of a five-day waiting period to purchase a handgun. Or that, a decade later, he voted in favour of allowing guns in national parks and on Amtrak trains?
But gun carnage and racism, that black lives do matter, seem not front of mind among the overwhelmingly white and young constituency — judging from his primary rallies. They were so captivated by Sanders’ oratory on the hustings: the soft “s” socialism of income redistribution; the ugly underbelly of globalization; clawing back the influence of billionaire oligarchs on politics; defying Wall Street; job creation (which played particularly well with a welleducated, middle class transitioning unhappily from la-la college campuses to the real world); and free university; the type of government largesse that helped bankrupt Greece.
Why not acknowledge the impact Sanders had on shifting Clinton’s platform to a more liberal left, particularly on commitments to increase the minimum wage to at least $15 an hour and eliminate college tuition for families with an annual income under $125,000?
The irascibly idealistic Sanders, who would have been utterly unelectable in November, has served a historical purpose. That he was viewed dimly and undermined by the establishment — specifically the Democratic National Committee — was confirmed by WikiLeaks releasing a tranche of hacked emails, resulting in the convention kicking off with the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Not quite the abomination of bile that infused every word and gesture of the Republican convention last week, but embarrassing nonetheless. The difference is the GOP as constituted in the Trump era revels in its malignancies.
Having courted and attracted a legion of militant foot soldiers, Sanders, the great revolutionary, seems now incapable of controlling them, certainly not directing their disbandment. In a way, the defiant Bernie Believers have moved be- yond their leader. They’re generally new to the political process and unobservant of its tacit code of conduct, that only compromise allows the whole mess to function. But Sanders drew his strength as an outsider from a perceived revulsion for compromise. The disenchanted and disillusioned and politically naïve responded to that rebelliousness. Those who still won’t accept Sanders’ defeat would rather risk a victory for Trump — and much will depend in a close election on who stays home, as some of the Sanders acolytes have threatened, so intractable is their opposition to Clinton — than reconcile. As one delegate told the New York Times: “They have to realize that the art of politics is compromise. That is anathema to them.”
Unity is a dirty word to a significant number of Sanders backers.
Those could have been the crazies of the Republican party, shouting LOCK HER UP on Monday. Those could have been the Trump loonies symbolically taping their mouths shut on the delegate floor.
Chicago Tribune columnist Rex W. Huppke wrote the other day: “After last week’s Mad Max: Fury Road-themed Republican National Convention, the bar for Hillary Clinton’s coronation this week in Philadelphia had been set fairly low. Low enough, apparently, that the Democratic Party managed to trip over it and land face-first in the mud.”
The diehards booed Sanders intermittently during his speech, whenever he pleaded for unity on behalf of the Clinton presidential bid. They’ve fled the big pole tent into which many ventured only because of Sanders’ quixotic allure.
Their last hurrah came Tuesday, in dewy-eyed nomination speeches for the iconoclast Sanders as their septuagenarian idol looked on, unreadable, emotional only when his brother paid tribute to their Jewish immigrant parents. Vermont brought up the rear on the floor, for their “beloved” Senator Sanders.
Strategically, he was given the near-last word. “I move that Hillary Clinton be selected as the nominee of the Democratic Party for president of the United States.”
Rules were suspended allowing Clinton to be nominated by acclamation.
Sanders’ tilting at windmills was not in vain. It has been vainglorious.
The roll call of delegate votes was a last stand, final opportunity — one can only hope — for the dead-enders to muscle their anger into the spotlight. Because anger, diffuse and reactionary, is the purview of Trump’s America. And Trump is the beneficiary of Democratic discord.
Lesson lost on the heretics: Know thy enemy.
One convention protester vowed: “I’m not going to have Trump held up to our head like a gun.” BANG. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.