Month: June 2016

It takes more than one election to defeat a revolution.

It takes more than one election to defeat a revolution. The Democratic party is what it is and will never change if change is expected to come from within.

People need to move on from pinning theirs hopes on a single candidate to working on the momentum to get real progressives elected at every level.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/democrats-will-learn-all-the-wrong-lessons-from-brush-with-bernie-20160609

From the article:

Originally shared by Perry Stroika

From the article:

At the moment, Hillary Clinton, a couple of weeks from officially clinching the party nomination, is struggling to unite Democrats around her candidacy. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, shows no indication that he is excited to throw his support her way once he’s been defeated. He is going to want meaningful concessions about the way the Democratic Party does business, what it believes in, and for whom it acts.

The Clinton campaign and other Democratic Party leaders have two ways of dealing with this. One is to reprimand Sanders for the recent unpleasantness and freeze him out by shooting down everything he asks for. Mathematically, given the numbers the Clinton camp possesses at the convention (by virtue of her winning a majority of delegates), they could go down this path. It would just be extremely stupid politics, since Sanders has millions of hardened supporters whom Clinton will need in November, and more proximately, he could trigger a convention floor fight if he felt compelled. The other path is to deal with Sanders in a way that acknowledges his contributions to the intraparty debate without undermining Clinton’s earned status atop it.

The composition of the Democratic Party platform is setting up to be a central vehicle for such dealing. Why the platform? It’s just meaningful enough to signal the general beliefs of a party and the direction in which it’s moving but not powerful enough to bind a nominee to all of its planks. Rather than look at ceding platform planks to Sanders as a burden, the Clinton campaign could see it as a positive means of bridging party divisions ahead of the autumn grind. And though Sanders wouldn’t be the nominee, it would be a victory of sorts to insert planks supporting, say, single-payer health care and a $15 minimum wage into Clinton’s platform.

……..

The Washington Post reported Friday that the DNC is prepared to meet Sanders halfway on committee seatings. But the composition of the platform committee or its document’s 15 writers is a sideshow to where the real action will take place: between the Sanders and Clinton campaigns, in private, ahead of time. Clinton wants to avoid an off-putting floor mess, so the two campaigns will likely work out a deal on the most contentious issues ahead of time and then instruct all the relevant committees and panels to write it all down.

Though the Clinton campaign has to draw the line somewhere to assert her power over the party, one recent report—backed up by my own conversations—suggests the Clinton campaign is willing to be flexible with the platform to bring Sanders on board.

“I expect that there’ll be some conciliation” on the platform, says Frank, Sanders’ nemesis. “I don’t think anybody wants to give any of Sanders’ people any reason to feel offended.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/05/why_the_democrats_platform_actually_matters_this_year.html