No, Bernie, Saturday night’s not all right for fightin’
Hear about the chaos that broke out at a political event last weekend? No, it wasn’t a Donald Trump rally. It was a convention full of Democrats in Las Vegas.
Angry that Nevada Democratic Party officials wouldn’t change the rules to favor Bernie Sanders, his supporters all but rioted in the hotel ballroom where the convention was held Saturday night — yelling, throwing chairs and later texting and phoning death threats to state party Chair Roberta Lange.
Sanders’ supporters booed Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and seemed so out of control that Boxer said she feared for her safety. Security officials shut the convention down when they felt they could no longer guarantee the security of the participants.
Even worse than the entitled tantrums of Sanders’ supporters, though, was the reaction of the candidate himself. He issued a statement that sanctimoniously lectured party officials about the importance of his campaign and gave short shrift to the violence committed by his supporters.
Sanders’ rhetoric has grown harsher and more bitter as the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has gone on, perhaps because despite winning numerous primaries and caucuses, he remains hopelessly stuck behind Hillary Clinton in the delegate count.
Sanders accuses party officials of rigging the election process against him, so it’s little surprise that his angry supporters lashed out against those same officials. It’s up to the candidate to be absolutely clear to even his most rabid backers that there are lines no one should cross. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Sanders’ response would be a “test of leadership.” It was, and Saunders failed.
Sanders does have some legitimate grievances. Party officials refused to take his candidacy seriously at first, and they scheduled early debates between him and Clinton at times when fewer people were watching.
But while Sanders has done far better than anyone expected, he is still losing decisively by every metric. Even after Sanders beat Clinton in Oregon on Tuesday and essentially tied her in Kentucky, she leads him in pledged delegates — 1,768 to 1,494 — and commands overwhelming support among party superdelegates.
In primary elections, Clinton has won about 13 million votes to Sanders’ roughly 10 million. Though the national polling gap between them has narrowed sharply since the start of the race, Sanders has never led Clinton, and he now trails her by almost six points. If this were a prize fight, the refs would have called it.
Though he has virtually no chance of overtaking Clinton, Sanders has every right to stay in until the voting ends, as he has promised to do. But he would do himself, his party and American politics a huge favor if he finished out the campaign with more grace and maturity than he has shown lately.
Few things would help Republicans more than a violent, outof-control Democratic convention in Philadelphia this summer like the one in Chicago that helped elect Richard Nixon as a law-and-order GOP candidate in 1968. Democrats had better hope that what happened in Vegas stays in Vegas.