UNITY AROUND A PROGRESSIVE AGENDA
FOLLOWING THE MEETING WITH HILLARY CLINTON, we were faced with two immediate tasks. The first was to find a meeting of the minds on the details of the policy positions around education, health care, and reform of the nominating process and the DNC. The second was handling all the logistics of prepping for the convention. That meant negotiating things like speaking times and setting up our operation at the convention. It also meant ensuring that all our elected delegates had the resources and information they would need to get to and participate in what for many would be their first Democratic convention. It was certainly mine. All of this was made more difficult by the reduction of our staff, now drastically pared down to a couple of dozen people.
Policy discussions got off to a slow start. By our first call with the Clinton folks, they had retreated substantially from the suggestion Podesta had put out at the meeting. They wanted to cap the benefit at incomes of only $65,000—for Bernie, a nonstarter. He had already agreed that we would accept something less than a universal program, but an income level of $65,000 left out far too many middle-class families.
Their position was that moving the cap to $150,000 would cost too much money. They wanted only to support campaign proposals they could fund once elected. My suggestion was to tax the rich a little bit more than the modest increases the Clinton campaign had been advocating during the primaries. Charlie Baker later told me that after the first call, Clinton policy guru Jake Sullivan’s office was packed with policy people debating back and forth.
We then began about a two-week series of calls with the Clinton campaign to try to push them to accept a number that would make the college plan meaningful to the broadest swath of Americans possible. Slowly but surely, the number the Clinton campaign would accept began to go up, though in tiny increments. I spoke with Bernie, who wanted to ensure we got as close to universal as possible. His position was that we would split the difference of John Podesta’s suggestion between $100,000–$150,000 cap at $125,000, but that was as low as he would go.
In our second-to-last phone call on the topic, Robby Mook said that they just could not go any higher; the policy people were against it. I suggested again that they go back and tweak their tax plan—taxing the wealthy a bit more to make room for the $125,000 cap. It seemed so simple, and the dragged-out negotiations were delaying Bernie’s endorsement of Secretary Clinton. I said, “You have to make a decision. It’s called a political campaign, not a policy campaign, for a reason.” If they wanted the votes of Bernie supporters, they needed to be willing to make a commitment to a strong college plan.
The timing of an endorsement became an internal topic of consideration. One key point that Bernie expressed publicly was that he was not the dictator of his supporters. Ultimately the Clinton campaign wanted his endorsement because they wanted the votes of the 43 percent of Democratic primary voters who had pulled the lever for Bernie. Those voters were as committed as Bernie was to the fundamental changes he advocated on the trail. Racing out and endorsing Hillary Clinton within days of the last primary contest, without any sign of good faith from the Clinton camp around the issues that had animated Bernie’s campaign, would have done more harm than good. The Clinton folks got this point, but they didn’t necessarily like that it was true.
In addition, Bernie wanted to cement in as many policy gains from the Clinton side as possible. In that sense he was being practical in terms of advancing the progressive issues he has championed for a lifetime. He had leverage—leverage created by the millions of people who supported him—and he intended to use it on their behalf.
We had many internal meetings about the timing of an endorsement. Tad was much more in the camp of endorsing quickly. At one meeting at Bernie’s house—which has been grossly mischaracterized elsewhere—he made the case that endorsing before having secured commitments from the Clinton camp would engender goodwill from them that might result in greater policy gains down the road. Bernie, Jane, and I were not convinced. Given how hard it was to negotiate the income cap on the college plan, Tad’s point of view didn’t line up with the reality we were experiencing on the ground.
Perhaps an earlier endorsement would have tipped the balance on the free college cap sooner. But we would have lost all the leverage we had on other issues we were pursuing in connection with the upcoming platform and rules committee meetings—issues like the $15 minimum wage, ending superdelegates, trade, and criminal justice reform, to name just a few.
While discussions were taking place, some voices on the periphery of Clinton-world (I called them the “political peanut gallery”) started grousing publicly about why it was taking so long for an endorsement to be announced. Within the campaigns themselves, everyone understood that an endorsement was coming but that there were things to be worked out first. No one in the Clinton inner circle criticized the timing publicly. Maybe they were really upset and just trying to play nice. Or maybe they understood that the process we were undertaking was necessary to make Bernie’s endorsement meaningful. There’s no way to know, but those closest to Clinton kept their powder dry. In truth, during this period, you could tell who really was a Clinton insider and who was not. All the bellyachers were not. Whenever someone on television attacked Bernie over the endorsement timing, I would look to John Robinson and say, “Well, there’s another name we know won’t be in the cabinet.”
Our final conversation about the college plan happened the day after the “it’s called a political campaign” call. Team Clinton agreed to support a $125,000 income cap. That figure would cover some 80 percent of all U.S. households. If the plan were enacted, the doors of higher education would be thrown open for millions.
Per our agreement, HFA released their updated college plan on July 6. It married our agreed-upon free tuition proposal with the college plan that the Clinton camp had rolled out during the primaries. The addition of our provision, free tuition at public colleges and universities for families making up to $125,000, to Clinton’s previous plan made the new plan in many ways the best of both. Bernie was quoted as saying as much in a CNN story that ran that day: “This proposal combines some of the strongest ideas which she brought forth during the campaign with some of the principals [sic] that I brought forth.” And how did they pay for raising the cap? The Clinton policy people did the right thing. An unnamed Clinton aide in that same CNN story said that the additional cost of adding the Sanders provisions would be paid for by “closing additional high-income tax loopholes—focusing on loopholes available especially to Wall Street money managers, like hedge funds and private equity firms.”
The outcome was a very positive sign that once Hillary Clinton became president there would be opportunities to make progress. But that required that Hillary Clinton be elected—a goal that Bernie Sanders threw himself into in the fall.
One pre-convention task was finalizing our slates of pledged delegates. Democratic pledged convention delegates—earned in actual elections—come in three varieties. The first group are elected at the congressional district–level conventions. In those elections our campaign played no role. People ran for delegate, and they were either elected by their Bernie-supporting peers or they were not.
The second group are at-large delegates—chosen differently from state to state but for all practical purposes picked by the campaigns. One of the major purposes of at-large delegates is to allow the campaigns to achieve diversity in their state delegations, as mandated by the Democratic rules. For instance, if there is an imbalance in the number of men or women chosen at the congressional district level, that can be remedied with at-large delegates of the underrepresented gender.
The same is true of racial diversity and in other categories for which there are representational targets. There was some confusion about this in several states among people who wanted to be considered for at-large delegate spots who felt they were unfairly excluded. In most cases, it was because our campaign took very seriously the need to meet the diversity guidelines in the Democratic rules. There were a few instances of people who applied for our at-large spots who were actually public Clinton supporters. I guess getting to go to the convention was enough incentive for them to suddenly like Bernie. We culled them.
The third group of pledged delegates are party leader and elected officials (PLEOs). This category is often confused with unpledged superdelegates. PLEOs are pledged delegates, and the number of PLEO slots won in each state is based on the elections in those states. But the slots do have to be filled by the campaigns with party leaders (for instance, county party chairs) or elected officials who are not superdelegates. In the rules, preference is given to certain categories of elected officials, but of course they have to support the candidate to whom they are pledged. Because most electeds were lined up behind Hillary Clinton, our PLEOs often held lower offices—they tended to be state representatives or local government officials.
Many of our pledged delegates were having difficulty coming up with the money to get to the convention and to pay the wildly expensive hotel rates that were being charged in Philadelphia. That is just a reality when working-class people, students, and others without a lot of money become involved in the political process. Many of them set up GoFundMe pages. We also raised money ourselves. We were determined that none of our people would be excluded from the convention because of the considerable cost. It was an enormous lift organizationally with our skeleton crew.
We also began organizing our convention “whip” operation to ensure that in the event of floor fights we would be able to effectively communicate with our delegates so that they could vote as a block. We were not necessarily anticipating floor fights at this point, but the platform and rules committees had not met, so we prepared just in case.
Even though we had come to agreement with the Clinton campaign on the college plans and the health care improvements, there were many other issues that Bernie was still dedicated to pushing in the platform and rules committees. Robby Mook and I tried to work out a solution to the superdelegate issue. We wanted no superdelegates. The Clinton campaign wanted vague nonbinding language, and so we were not able to resolve it prior to the rules committee meeting. All of us understood that there were issues that still had to be worked out. There was not really a lot of risk on the Clinton campaign’s part—they knew they ultimately controlled the votes on both committees. That was a concern from our end.
The membership of the platform and rules committees was determined proportionately by the state-by-state results in the primary and caucuses. Because Hillary Clinton won more delegates, she would pick more platform and rules (and credentials) members than Bernie would. In addition, the chair of the party handpicked twenty-five members of each of the three committees.
Earlier in the year, chairwoman Wasserman Schultz had asked us to submit some names for her to consider in making her seventy-five committee picks. We submitted forty names. Exactly three were given slots. Combined with the chair’s picks, the Clinton campaign could heavily outvote us. This was just another way in which the deck was stacked against not only Bernie but the progressive agenda he was advancing. This was on top of our concerns about the choice of chairs for the rules and platform committees, which Bernie had expressed personally to Hillary Clinton at their meeting.
The platform committee was to meet on July 8 and 9 in Orlando. Before it did, the fifteen-member Democratic Party Platform Drafting Committee was constituted in late May to create, as its name suggests, a draft of the platform to be considered and amended in Orlando. Technically, the DNC chair had the authority to appoint all fifteen members. But given that Debbie Wasserman Schultz had chosen only three of the forty names our campaign had submitted to fill her seventy-five slots on the three committees, we didn’t have a lot of confidence (okay, we had no confidence) that her appointments would reflect the outcome of the Democratic primaries and caucuses.
Bernie called Wasserman Schultz in early May about the drafting committee. She told him that she would consider allowing each campaign to submit ten names; she would choose four from each list and then appoint the remaining seven herself. That sounded like we were being rolled. In truth, even by this point I had more confidence in the Clinton staff than I did in the chairwoman’s office. The primaries were ending, and however they turned out, the Clinton people (who expected to win) did have an interest by this time in not completely blowing up the party. Debbie Wasserman Schultz had shown repeatedly that the health of the party was clearly secondary to her personal agenda and vendettas.
Bernie sent a letter to Wasserman Schultz on May 6 suggesting that the campaigns each pick seven representatives and jointly agree on the fifteenth member, who would serve as chair. This arrangement completely cut out Wasserman Schultz herself. Finally, a compromise was reached whereby the campaigns could submit names for a designated number of slots. Bernie was allowed to submit names for five of the slots on the drafting committee. The Clinton campaign got six slots and the DNC four. Even so, the chair had the final sign-off on which, if any, of the submitted names would be appointed.
When we sent over our list, the DNC immediately had problems. The first was that we had included the executive director of National Nurses United, RoseAnn DeMoro. It’s no secret in Washington that the DNC establishment types do not like the straight-talking head of the nurses union. The DNC then came up with the rule that they did not want representatives of organized labor on the drafting committee. Wait a second, we said. Hillary Clinton’s choice for the committee, Paul Booth, was from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). We had no objection to Paul Booth, but we wanted to be able to appoint a labor person as well. Then the rule was clarified to one where it was okay to have members from organized labor, just not the heads of unions.
The DNC had one other objection to our list of picks. They said that the seating of our list would put too many black people on the committee. I was flabbergasted when I heard it. We pushed back because it was so outrageous. But they would not budge.
The drafting committee met through June. During the deliberations, as reported by Salon’s Ben Norton, the committee defeated amendments by the Sanders delegates—led by Rep. Keith Ellison—to include a fully indexed $15 minimum wage, a requirement that federal contractors pay at least $15 an hour, opposing cuts to workers’ pensions, and expressly stating opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In each case but one, all the Clinton and DNC appointees voted, as my old friend John Franco would describe it, with Leninist party discipline in opposition to the Sanders delegates’ amendments. (The exception was that Rep. Barbara Lee voted with the Bernie delegates in favor of the $15 minimum wage; the chair, Rep. Elijah Cummings, didn’t vote, as he only voted in case of a tie.)
The politics around the amendment relating to the TPP were complicated. Hillary Clinton had announced her opposition to the TPP during the campaign after calling it the gold standard while secretary of state. Her move was viewed by many as a means of boxing out Bernie and Vice President Biden and shoring up her standing with organized labor. There was a lot of doubt about how strongly she would oppose what was expected to be consideration of the TPP during the lame-duck session of Congress, that is the meeting of Congress after the election but before newly elected congresspeople are sworn into January, following the presidential election. (It never was considered because Trump, who campaigned actively against the TPP, ended up winning.)
The Obama administration was pushing hard for the TPP to be passed in the lame-duck session. As a result, the administration opposed including explicit language critical of the TPP in the Democratic platform. The Clinton campaign used President Obama’s position—which was the opposite of her public position during the campaign—as the reason they would not support any TPP-specific language in the platform. The fight would play itself out again at the full platform committee in Orlando and on the Democratic convention floor.
The draft adopted by the fifteen-member platform drafting committee was now on its way to the full platform committee meeting in Orlando on July 8. In my conversations with Robby Mook in the lead-up to that meeting, the Clinton campaign agreed to support the stronger $15 minimum wage language in Orlando. However, they remained adamant that the TPP not be included. (They also remained opposed to single-payer health care, a ban on fracking, a carbon tax, and other policies.)
We were determined to create as progressive a platform as possible. By the time of Orlando, the two campaigns had already agreed that Bernie would endorse Hillary Clinton on July 12 in New Hampshire. But that didn’t mean that our campaign would stop pushing for a platform that represented the values of the Democratic rank and file. Our polling consistently showed that even among Hillary Clinton’s supporters there was broad support for a far more progressive agenda than that put forward by the Clinton campaign. The platform was also, from Bernie’s standpoint, an important tool for communicating to voters a set of policies that would set the Democratic Party—and Hillary Clinton—up for success in the fall.
Our campaign didn’t have any interest in gratuitously highlighting the administration’s difference with the overwhelming majority of Democratic voters—and the top two candidates for the nomination—on the issue of TPP. Despite Hillary Clinton’s talking points, Bernie has always recognized—he spoke of it often on the trail—the disastrous situation that President Obama found himself in when he was first elected and a barrage of false Republican attacks was lodged against him day in and day out.
Of course, Bernie had tried to push the Obama administration in a more progressive direction. That was his job as a U.S. senator. But he had stood with the president on all his signature achievements—the Affordable Care Act, the auto rescue package, the stimulus package, the effort to commute the sentences of oversentenced people, the Iran nuclear deal, and more.
So I called David Simas, Obama’s political director. We had talked many times, especially near the end of the primary season. I am sorry now that I never got to take him up on his repeated offer to swing by the White House.
“Is it the administration’s intention to push hard for the passage of the TPP in the lame-duck session?” I asked him.
“Yes, it is,” he replied.
Okay, question answered. Defeating what we viewed as yet another job-destroying trade agreement had to come first.
* * *
Our team arrived in Orlando on the seventh. We met with a group of Clinton and DNC folks. The meeting was late and seemed unnecessarily tense from the get-go. The purpose was to talk about the ground rules for the platform committee meeting. To be perfectly honest, I can’t even remember what started us down an increasingly negative exchange. We were not only not making progress, but things were going in the wrong direction. At one point I zipped up my briefcase, stood up, and just stood there. The other members of the team looked at me and, without saying a word, packed their stuff. We all walked out. Tomorrow would be better, we hoped.
The next day started fine. We held a meeting with all our platform committee delegates. There were 187 total delegates. Clinton had 90, Bernie had 72, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz picked 25. Bernie had less than 39 percent of the delegates to the platform committee, even though he had received over 43 percent of the Democratic primary vote and convention delegates. Given that reality, we had to stick together. Even if we did, we would need 22 Clinton or DNC delegates to vote with us to overcome a Clinton objection. That was a tall order; the Clinton and DNC platform drafting committee members had been highly disciplined. To make progress on almost anything required that we negotiate with the Clinton campaign. They effectively controlled over 60 percent of the votes in the room.
Many of our delegates had submitted proposed amendments, in some cases a large number. Our position was that we would support the amendments of our delegates unless they were counter to a position Bernie had taken. We worked to figure out which ones were duplicates. There was no need to have multiple votes on the same amendment. We wanted to make progress, not waste time. Even so, there were going to be a lot of amendments offered.
We also met with the Clinton staff to see which of our delegates’ amendments might be acceptable to them in their current form or with minor tweaks. There were many that we resolved that way. It was in everyone’s interest to not take up a lot of time with things that were unobjectionable to both sides.
During our meetings with our delegates, we explained the system we would use for signaling what the campaign’s recommended vote was on a particular amendment. Staff at each side of the room would hold up a green piece of paper for a yes vote and a red piece for a no vote. If the campaign had no position, then we would not hold up either. The Clinton campaign used a similar system, with people giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to their people, and in addition they used electronic communications.
The first major bump in the road happened when a completely baseless rumor spread through the Clinton camp that Bernie was on a flight to Orlando to personally lobby platform committee delegates on the TPP. By that time, Marc Elias, the Clinton campaign’s lawyer, had arrived and was helping to coordinate their team.
Marc and his firm represented the Clinton campaign, the DNC, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Hillary Clinton’s super PAC Priorities USA, and a host of other Democratic Party organs, related super PACs, and elected officials. He also is responsible for much of the up-to-the-line legal structures that were used by the Clinton campaign, including David Brock’s super PAC that controversially coordinated with the Clinton campaign.
I have known Marc Elias for years. He represented Bernie’s 2006 Senate campaign. And Marc was a student in Bernie’s class when Bernie spent a semester teaching at Hamilton College between his 1988 and 1990 congressional runs. Marc owns a summer house in Vermont. (I promised if he behaved I wouldn’t put out his address and affiliation to his Vermont neighbors.) So there was no personal animosity between us. But let’s just say that he was and is a zealous advocate for his client, and he could be counted on to play hardball. All that being said, the fact that he and I knew each other helped smooth the process in Orlando—especially because he had a direct line to Robby Mook, who was not there in person.
It was Marc Elias who brought to me the somewhat panicked news that the Clinton campaign had heard that Bernie was on a plane headed to Orlando. It was a ridiculous rumor. I told him so. Assured, he walked away.
He came back to me not long after to tell me he was still hearing rumors that Bernie was coming to Orlando.
“If he was coming to Orlando, first of all I’d know about it, and second of all I’d just tell you he was coming to Orlando,” I said. “He’s not coming to Orlando.”
“Can you check?” Elias asked a bit sheepishly. I got the sense that he was not asking for himself but wanted to calm the nerves of some anxious worrier.
“Can I check? Sure.”
So I pulled out my cell phone with Elias standing there and pushed the speed dial for Bernie.
“Hello,” Bernie said.
“Hey, Bernie, it’s Jeff. Where are you right now?”
“I’m in my office, why?” he asked.
“You aren’t coming to Orlando, are you?” I asked him.
“Orlando? Why would I come to Orlando?”
I then explained to him the rumor that was circulating.
“That’s crazy. Well, you can tell anyone who wants to know that I’m not coming Orlando.”
I hung up the phone. Elias was finally satisfied, and the rumor that Bernie was winging his way to central Florida was finally laid to rest.
The Clinton folks weren’t the only ones suffering from a lack of trust. Pretty soon it was my turn. It happened when we and the Clinton campaign were reviewing the proposed amendments to see which might be acceptable. When we got to the amendment that called for a $15 federal minimum wage, the Clinton policy person indicated that they had a problem with it. That came as a complete surprise to me, because Robby Mook and I had specifically discussed it, and he had assured me that they were fine with it. No doubt we were being double-crossed.
I called Robby to explain the situation. He acknowledged that we had come to an agreement on the issue. “Well, you are going to have to talk to your people here, because that’s not their understanding,” I told him.
Conversations between Brooklyn and the Clinton team in Orlando ensued. Meanwhile, the proceedings of the platform committee were being held up while this was going on. The policy person was apparently unhappy that the agreement on the $15 minimum wage had not been communicated, with the result being that this person had made representations to others that the Clinton campaign position was opposed. This wasn’t really my problem—until the policy person just disappeared, and the proceedings were in recess for hours.
I called Robby back somewhat annoyed. “What the hell, Robby?” I asked. “Where is your person? Did they go on strike because they didn’t get the memo on the minimum wage?”
He was also clearly exasperated by whatever was going on. “Something like that,” he replied. “I’m working on it.” To me, the fact that the information had not been conveyed to the staffer in Orlando was completely understandable. Brooklyn was trying to win an election. What was incomprehensible is how one person thought it acceptable to keep almost 200 people waiting.
In the end, the agreement held. State senator Nina Turner offered the $15 minimum wage amendment and with a minor tweak it was approved, as was the language protecting workers’ pensions that had been defeated at the platform drafting committee stage.
Not surprisingly, the amendment in support of a single-payer, Medicare for All program failed. One of the Clinton delegates was walking by as the vote was being tallied. She stopped for just a second. “That’s what Obama should have done in the first place,” she said.
“So you voted for the amendment?” I asked.
“No, I voted against it.” And she turned and walked back to her seat. Leninist party discipline.
We did come together on a number of issues, including criminal justice reform. On environmental issues, we could not convince the Clinton people to endorse a carbon tax. But they did consent to language stating that “greenhouse gases should be priced to reflect their negative externalities, and to accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy and help meet our climate goals.” Environmental activist and film director Josh Fox and 350.org head Bill McKibben, both of whom were in Orlando, confirmed that the language represented a major step forward.
On the issue of the TPP, the other side would not budge. We gave them two opportunities to do so. AFSCME head Lee Saunders offered an amendment to the platform laying out the criteria any trade agreement had to meet to be acceptable. Ben Jealous offered an amendment to that language stating that the TPP did not meet that standard. Jealous’s amendment received the votes of the Sanders delegates, but the Clinton and DNC delegates, including those representing organized labor, voted against it. (By the way, for all those in the gallery who enjoyed the pizza the campaign provided during the long proceedings, you can thank Ben Jealous. He came up and asked if the campaign would buy it, and I immediately signed off on it.)
The second opportunity came when former Texas agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower offered an amendment that called for the TPP to not be passed during the lame-duck session of Congress. The vote was essentially the same. Our team was extremely disappointed by the results. Not only because the TPP was bad policy, but also because the Clinton campaign and the DNC were having major labor leaders vote against the unified position of organized labor, which was adamantly anti-TPP. The best hope of passing the TPP was in the lame-duck session of Congress coming up in the fall. All the unions were against it. Yet in Orlando their leaders were voting against amendments to stop it.
In our view, the other side’s position was severely damaging Hillary Clinton’s chance in the fall. If the campaign was just carrying water for the president, he was asking a very, very high price of her. Eric Bradner, writing for CNN, captured the dilemma:
By keeping specific opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership out of the platform, Democrats avoided embarrassing President Barack Obama, whose administration has spent most of his two terms negotiating the massive 12-nation trade deal.
However, the decision also opens up Clinton and other Democrats to questions about whether their opposition to the Pacific Rim pact is sincere.
It’s a politically precarious position as presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump turns decades of Republican pro-trade orthodoxy on its head, regularly railing against the Trans-Pacific Partnership and other free trade deals on the campaign trail.
After the November election, one Clinton aide said to me, “Well, I guess we’ll never know if Hillary Clinton was really against that TPP or not.” That same confusion was shared by working Americans across the country and reinforced by the mixed signals the Clinton campaign was sending by, for example, torpedoing anti-TPP amendments in Orlando.
David Weigel quoted one of our delegates to the platform committee whose view summed up what many of us believed at the time: “‘We’re trying to save Secretary Clinton from herself,’ said Brent Welder, a labor lawyer and Sanders delegate from Missouri.” But in early July in Orlando, the Clinton campaign either didn’t want to be saved or didn’t feel they needed to be. The election results in the industrial heartland in November proved them wrong.
There was one surprising win at the platform meeting in Atlanta. An amendment to create a pathway for legalization of marijuana by the states won by one vote. During the debate, the Clinton campaign had signaled (perhaps mis-signaled) to its platform committee delegates that it had no position on the amendment, which allowed them to vote however they saw fit. There was an attempt to have a revote, but it would have completely blown up the meeting, so the Clinton folks quickly put a stop to it.
One can only imagine how many other amendments might have been passed if the delegates had been left to vote their conscience. That’s not a criticism. The Clinton campaign was managing its delegation to get its desired result, as were we on our side. The only point here is that much of the Democratic Party is far more progressive than it has been allowed to show.
At the end of the day, Bernie’s efforts to push the Democratic platform in a more progressive direction were an overwhelming success. NBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald noted that “Sanders’ decision to stay in the race has baffled many and alarmed others, who worry he might help Trump by fracturing the Democratic Party. But this weekend’s meeting of the Democratic Platform Committee showed that in defying norms, Sanders notched real victories and advanced his so-called ‘political revolution.’”
Obviously, our side did not get everything it wanted. On the other hand, the Clinton campaign made concessions and worked with us to create a document that we all could embrace. They understandably felt that they were making concessions that no putative nominee had had to make in terms of the platform since 1988. It wasn’t always a pretty process or even a friendly one. But it was an example of how talking, debating, and at times fighting could in fact bring the party together. The limits of what is possible can only be discovered by pushing up against the edge of what is impossible.