We are live from Philadelphia and it is hot. On Sunday the chair of the Democratic National Committee announced her upcoming resignation, and it’s only fitting that the convention itself feels leaderless and disorganized.
The convention is being held at the basketball arena far from the hotels and restaurants where people want to be. And if you ask the journalists who attended the RNC in Cleveland, that was by far a better run event.
Not on the stage, of course. Almost everything that could go wrong for Republicans in Cleveland did go wrong; an attempted Stop Trump effort in the rules committee and on the floor, a plagiarism scandal, empty seats in primetime, Ted Cruz’s call to vote one’s conscience, and Trump’s acceptance speech, which was as dark and demonizing as any in modern American history.
Still, Donald Trump got a ten point bounce. And today, Democrats are terrified.
Trump might actually win, is the headline of July. As crazy as that sounds. And it’s going to be close either way, coming down again to Florida and Ohio. (Though Trump probably also needs Pennsylvania, which is why we’re here.)
This was supposed to be the boring convention. The other convention. The staged convention. And before she gavels it in at 4:30 today, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz had already been taken down by the political revolution.
And today she will be booed.
It’s not really a scandal that the Democratic National Committee secretly opposed the candidacy of an independent democratic-socialist who only became a registered Democrat for this race. If anything it’s a bigger scandal that the RNC never tried to stop Trump (though I’d love to see their internal emails on him).
But here we are. Everything is on the line. And it’s on the line tonight. Liberals are poised to win a majority on the Supreme Court for the first time since the 1970s, opening the door for radical progress on civil rights, criminal justice, social equality and campaign finance reform. But instead of embracing that moment, progressives in the Warren-Dean-Bernie wing of the party are getting cold feet, because who Bernie is handing them off to at the altar.
That’s what tonight is about. Tonight’s speakers include Keith Ellison from the House Progressive Caucus, Senator Jeff Merkley, the leaders of organized labor, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie himself. In other words, the Left.
Bill Clinton will sell Hillary to the center, as will Bloomberg, and President Obama will vouch for her to his coalition of minorities and the young; but progressives need to come home. She’s losing too many of the them to Jill Stein and Gary Johnson for comfort in this close election.
The future of American democracy may ultimately come down to what Bernie Sanders says tonight. And we’ll be watching.
No 10-point bounce, sir. 6 points. Tops.
The CBS poll showed no change — a continued tie. CNN polling showed a 6-point bounce. But the Huffington Post’s aggregator, as well as the RealClearPolitics’ aggregator, still show a virtual tie.
Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com site analysis “suggests that Trump has gained a net of about 4 percentage points on Clinton in national polls from a week ago, turning a deficit of about 3 points into a 1-point lead. If so, Trump would turn out to have a fairly typical convention bounce.”
Not saying it won’t be a tough contest through November, but it was a modest bounce at best, and the Dems are not “terrified.”
If Dems aren’t terrified – why did DWS quit so suddenly when she denied all along that she wasn’t doing anything to take sides?
And what about all those other jaskass staffers and operatives still in the DNC whose names are all over those emails? DWS may have set the tone at the DNC and into the state, district and county parties, but the staffers and operatives did the work and the real damage.
That also says nothing about the other problem that was revealed in the DNC e-mails: HRC moles in Bernie’s campaign. We knew about them here in NC, and clearly there had to be some at the national level – otherwise why so many useless establishment conservaDems get hired to work for Bermie? I doubt they were paid or coordinated by either the DNC or the HRC campaign – but it would be fun to see the 1099 and tax forms for the Bernie staffers for 2015 and 2016 – I bet they’d tell an interesting story!
Wow, Armageddon is at hand. And it’s all up to Bernie to save democracy— or maybe just the American left?