My Old Dems Are Back, Feudin' and Fussin'
After attending the unusually raucous and divided National Republican Convention in Cleveland, I expected a reasonably sedate coronation of Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Maybe I should have known better.
But who would have expected a cascade of internal Democratic National Committee emails to be released Friday by Wikileaks.
Thousands of emails by party officials appeared to show a coordinated effort to help Clinton and confirmed what Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and his advisors had long claimed: that the DNC was biased toward Clinton in their party's primaries and caucuses.
To be clear, Clinton did not win her nomination because of dirty tricks at DNC headquarters. She won because she got more votes. Sanders was perfectly free to win primaries and caucuses and persuade the party's superdelegates, who are not bound by primaries or caucuses, to vote for them -- the same way a young senator named Barack Obama did in 2008.
Superdelegates have been around since the 1980s as a reform move to prevent the sort of insurgency that has enabled Trump to split the Grand Old Party. Yet Sanders and his supporters insisted the system was "rigged," as if the rules had been written in the past year or so with Sanders in mind.
Sanders demanded that the party chair, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, step down and, after the embarrassing emails were released, she did on Sunday. Even though the preferences of Schultz and other party bigwigs for Clinton were one of Washington's worst-kept secrets, the cat was out of the bag on her biases in a job in which she is supposed to remain fair and neutral.
But the #BernieOrBust movement was not appeased. When Schultz showed up to address a pre-convention breakfast meeting of Florida delegates on Monday, she was heckled, booed and otherwise treated like Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas at a Donald Trump rally.
During the convention's opening session, almost every mention of Clinton's name sparked a chorus of boos mixed with applause from the convention floor. Even Sanders was booed earlier in the day when he begged his supporters to support Clinton.
Matters improved, but barely, that evening when Sanders and his popular ally Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts gave full-throated endorsements of Clinton from the podium. Warren was heckled with cries of "We trusted you."
It took comedian Sarah Silverman, fed up with constant boos and "Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!" chants to tell the truth: "To the Bernie or Bust crowd," she said, visibly miffed, "you're being ridiculous."
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