WHEN BERNIE ENDORSED HILLARY CLINTON, he explicitly said that she would be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States. But he did not formally suspend his campaign or drop out. That was in part to maintain leverage in the successful negotiations over the platform and the rules. He was also committed to making sure his delegates had the opportunity to cast their votes for our campaign at the convention. This was important to our supporters. They wanted the roll call vote to happen. I suspect large numbers of them would have decided not to show up if that was not going to happen.
The Democratic National Convention was an opportunity to bring both sides together for the fight against the Trump candidacy. From our earliest discussions about the convention, the Clinton campaign was principally concerned about the political optics—that it not turn into a sectarian spectacle that the media and the Republicans would use to highlight Democratic divisions. Bernie shared their concern. He had run a long campaign, and there were still serious policy differences between him and Hillary Clinton. But they paled in comparison to his differences with Trump. For working people and poor people, especially, a Trump presidency would be a disaster (which it has been), and Bernie was committed to preventing Trump’s election in every way possible. That included peace at the convention, as long as our delegates were respected.
In the run-up to the convention, the campaigns had negotiated most of the issues, including when Bernie would speak. Both sides understood that there would be a roll call, but we were working on the exact mechanics until well into the event itself.
One particular issue of concern was the role of Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Under the rules, she was to, at a minimum, gavel in and gavel out the convention. I told Robby Mook early in the process, “If Debbie Wasserman Schultz walks out on that stage in Philadelphia, half of the convention is going to be loudly booing, and there’s not a thing I or anyone else can do about it. It’s not like we are going to incite something. We can ask everyone to behave, but it is not going to make a bit of difference. It’s going to be bad.”
The Clinton folks said that they understood, but they didn’t seem to be doing anything to take care of the problem. At the end of the day, it was their problem; they controlled the convention. They had been warned. If the first visual they wanted was discord, so be it. However, none of us could have anticipated the WikiLeaks grenade that was lobbed into the process on July 22, just three days before the convention opened. The release of the hacked DNC emails set our supporters ablaze. For anyone who had doubted that the DNC and Debbie Wasserman Schultz were actively trying to torpedo Bernie’s campaign, the emails said it all.
The email dump showed repeated antagonism toward the campaign. I was personally honored and amused to be the subject of Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s scorn. “Damn liar,” “Particularly scummy,” and “Ass.” I must have been doing something right. To the “Ass” comment, I responded to Politico, “Isn’t the ass the mascot of the dem party?”
What was troubling was the extent to which the national party was plotting against our campaign. The most incendiary email chain was from DNC CFO Brad Marshall to DNC CEO Amy Dacey and press team members Luis Miranda and Mark Paustenbach suggesting an attack on Bernie’s religion ahead of the Kentucky and West Virginia primaries. “It might make no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.”
Marshall followed up a few minutes later: “It’s these Jesus thing.”
DNC CEO Amy Dacey replied, “AMEN.”
While this was the most patently offensive exchange in the first nearly 20,000 emails, there were many others that demonstrated the close coordination of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Later releases would reveal even more. DNC staffers had discussed planting stories that our campaign was in disarray around the time of the VANghazi data issue in December. “Wondering if there’s a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess,” wrote DNC deputy communications director Mark Paustenbach. Another had the DNC consulting with Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias about responding to our campaign’s charges about the abuse of the joint fund-raising agreements that looted funds raised for state parties. Although, as we have seen, Elias’s firm also represented the DNC, we had been assured that there was a wall between lawyers representing the different parties. Elias’s email does not contain legal advice but rather political messaging pointers:
My suggestion is that the DNC put out a statement saying that the accusations the Sanders campaign [is making] are not true. The fact that CNN notes that you aren’t getting between the two campaigns is the problem. Here, Sanders is attacking the DNC and its current practice, its past practice with the POTUS and with Sec Kerry. Just as the RNC pushes back directly on Trump over “rigged system,” the DNC should push back DIRECTLY at Sanders and say that what he is saying is false and harmful [to] the Democratic party.
What we know now is that the points we had made were absolutely true, and that what was really hurting state Democratic parties was their impoverishment by the Clinton campaign. Other emails show Clinton and DNC press staffers frantically coordinating responses to the issue.
And there was so much more. The contents of the emails were in every news outlet. Although it didn’t directly affect us, the emails were full of insults at major donors and even a swipe at President Obama. In many circles, the fallout from donors was creating more waves than the news that the DNC had worked against Bernie Sanders. Bernie-world was rightly incensed. Inside our campaign, we were not surprised by the revelations. They were just confirmation of what we already knew and had been complaining about—in some cases to a skeptical media. Be that as it may, the convention became a lot more complicated.
The Clinton campaign finally realized that it was time for Debbie Wasserman Schultz to go, but they didn’t want it to be messy. They met with her privately to get her to resign for the good of the party. “I’m exhausted. It took five hours to get her to resign. She was just digging in her heels for most of it,” Robby Mook told me shortly after the meeting. She finally agreed to resign after insisting on speaking personally to President Obama. The Clinton campaign gave her a title for some nonexistent role in the campaign. Even then, Wasserman Schultz insisted that she wasn’t going to resign until after the convention. And she still intended to gavel it in and out!
“As Party Chair, this week I will open and close the Convention and I will address our delegates about the stakes involved in this election not only for Democrats, but for all Americans,” she wrote in her resignation statement.
“Does she not get it?” I asked Mook.
“You don’t know how hard it was just to get her to resign,” he replied.
“It’s going to be bad when she walks on that stage,” I warned.
My concerns became very real to everyone when Wasserman Schultz’s speech at the Florida delegation breakfast broke down as delegates angrily and loudly reacted to her appearance. It finally sank in.
“Okay, she’s out. She won’t be on the stage,” Mook told me after the Florida breakfast debacle.
I was walking with Mark Longabaugh through the crowded corridors of the arena where the convention was being held when I heard someone call out my name. It was Senator Harry Reid. He rushed over to me with a big smile. He placed his hands on my upper arms and gave me a light shake.
“We did it. We did it. We finally got rid of her,” he said with an ear-to-ear grin.
“Yes, we did, Senator,” I replied, beaming back at him.
Interim chair Donna Brazile called me before the announcement. “I won’t do it unless you and the senator are okay with it,” she said. “When I get over there I’m going to clean house.” She did just that. She issued a public apology to Bernie and his supporters for the DNC’s conduct and “accepted the resignation” of the DNC’s top staff in early August. We were pleased with the selection of Donna Brazile. (We did not yet know about the issue of the leaked debate questions at the Michigan debate and the Ohio town hall.) I called Bernie. He signed off on Brazile’s selection.
Just because Debbie Wasserman Schultz was done did not mean that our supporters and our delegates were ready to forgive all the transgressions against Bernie and the campaign that had been exposed for all to see. Bernie wanted to address his delegates at the convention to thank them and to ask them to join him in working to defeat Trump. The Clinton campaign was nervous about the prospect—they thought that it could lead to a lot of anti-Clinton venting. We had gone back and forth about it quite a bit in discussions before the convention. But Bernie was insistent that the event occur, and it did. It was supposed to be a private, closed-press event.
It turned out the press was in the packed room. The Bernie delegates were in no mood to hear about the need to elect Hillary Clinton in the wake of the email disclosures. Every time Bernie mentioned her name, they broke into boos. The Clinton folks were apoplectic as the cable news networks streamed coverage of the raucous meeting.
Mook called me. “What the f*ck? This is a disaster. This was supposed to be closed to the press.”
“Yes, it was. Not sure what happened,” I replied. “It will all work out,” I assured him. There wasn’t much else to say. He continued his expletive-filled venting for a while longer. Had the roles been reversed, I might have used even more than he did.
Bernie put out a text message to our delegates asking them not to protest on the floor as a “personal courtesy” to him. Even so, the Bernie delegates on that first day were vocally unhappy from the floor of the convention.
I spent much of the day doing media appearances, including one with Bloomberg’s Halperin and Heilemann. The interview was held in an area overlooking the convention floor. There was a considerable amount of audible commotion as they opened the interview by characterizing events as a “hot mess of a convention rollout.” We went back and forth about whether the Bernie delegates would continue in the same vein over the course of the week. I assured them that as the week went on people would get more in the “spirit of unity.” Halperin gave me a disbelieving eye roll. Heilemann said that based on the events of the day he expected Bernie delegates to boo Hillary Clinton’s name during his speech that night. And Halperin bet me a copy of Superman #1 that it would happen.
I saw Heilemann later that night on the floor after Bernie’s speech. He had to concede that his prediction had been wrong. Bernie’s speech was enthusiastically received. I still have not received my copy of Superman #1 from Mark Halperin (let me be clear that I want the Superman #1 from 1939, not the inexpensive later relaunches).
In hindsight, it probably helped a lot that first lady Michelle Obama and Senator Elizabeth Warren spoke earlier in the evening. Elizabeth Warren had disappointed many Bernie supporters by not endorsing him during the primaries, but she still had their respect for her long-term and continuing fight against the financial oligarchs. And Michelle Obama was and is so deeply respected by people across the Democratic Party.
As Bernie was about to speak, the Clinton staff, in an act of sincere generosity, vacated their seats on the elevated stage and gave them to me and other Sanders staff. For me it was a very emotional moment. Seeing Bernie standing in front of the cheering delegates at the Democratic National Convention made me think back to the early days of Bernie and me driving the backroads of Vermont. It struck me what an incredibly unlikely path he had charted, taking his fight for a fairer America from our small state to, literally, the national stage.
He came to the podium to thunderous and sustained applause and cheers. He thanked his supporters and family and then laid out the case, in a detailed, policy-oriented speech, for the election of Hillary Clinton and the defeat of Donald Trump. In that environment, he appropriately focused on what the two candidates had in common, but he did not shy away from important issues such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He closed with a full-throated endorsement of Hillary Clinton, and the crowd cheered its approval. While there was still unhappiness on the floor in the coming days, Bernie’s speech and the voting the next night really calmed the public displays of displeasure.
The next day, Tuesday, brought new challenges. That was the day that Bernie and Hillary Clinton were to be nominated and the votes of the delegates would be cast. Both Bernie and Clinton would have three people give nomination speeches. One of the people that Bernie wanted to nominate him was state senator Nina Turner. She had endorsed Bernie in the fall and had tirelessly and effectively campaigned for him from one end of the country to the other. She had never formally endorsed Hillary Clinton before endorsing Bernie, but from the time she announced her support, she experienced deep enmity from establishment circles. State senator Vincent Fort of Georgia, another African American supporter of Bernie’s, also faced substantial blowback for his endorsement. It was another manifestation of the race-shaming our rank-and-file supporters faced online.
Bernie’s view was that he should be able to choose the speakers who would nominate him. The Clinton campaign disagreed. The discussions about whether Nina Turner would be allowed to speak got very heated in both directions. Robby Mook contacted me by email on Tuesday afternoon with a rumor that folks were printing pictures of Monica Lewinsky to show on the floor. Included on his email were director of state campaign and political engagement Marlon Marshall and, on our team, Mark Longabaugh and Rania Batrice. Obviously, that was something we did not support. They wanted our help in dealing with it. I wanted theirs in letting Bernie pick his nominating speakers. They refused. So I replied to the email chain and added our top floor managers, Robert Becker, Rich Pelletier, and Pete D’Alessandro: “Becker, pete, rich Please stand down all sanders whip and floor operations.”
Within minutes, Pete D’Alessandro replied, “Standing down until otherwise notified.”
And all our staff walked off the floor of the convention and went to the holding room we were using in the Clinton staff area. They could deal with the Monica Lewinsky issue themselves.
I called Bernie. “This is outrageous,” he said. “What’s their problem? Go back and work on it.” Which is exactly what we continued to do. But they would not budge.
The Clinton campaign kept suggesting that they couldn’t have Nina Turner on stage because it would upset some group of supporters. One senior Clinton aide at one point said he wasn’t going to burn his personal relationships with people to let her speak. I didn’t give a damn about any staffer’s “personal” relationships, mine included. At that moment, after the experience at the platform committee meeting, I was a little tired of all the personal feelings that a few Clinton staff felt they had every right to inject into the process.
Mark Longabaugh and I were left in the meeting room alone after the exchange. “What the hell, Mark. Don’t you want your former opponents standing on stage endorsing you? What’s wrong with these people, don’t they get it?” I was convinced at that moment that I, Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager, was more interested in getting Hillary Clinton elected than some of her own people. (I’m sure they’d disagree.)
The time ticked by and they stood firm. We had no choice as the hour drew near but to choose an alternate speaker. After all, that person would have to have a speech prepared. We suggested Paul Feeney, the labor organizer who had been our Massachusetts and Connecticut state director. The Clinton people agreed. Paul Feeney hit it out of the park with his speech. But we were bitterly disappointed that Nina Turner had been kept off the stage.
However petty it was for Nina Turner to be denied a speaking role, we were not going to let the floor situation fall apart. I sent an email to the previous email chain: “Turn the floor operation back on. Let’s get people calmed. Rumors of Monica Lewinsky posters. Pls suppress.”
In many ways the roll call vote on Tuesday night held as much significance as Bernie’s speech the night before, if not more. With the casting of the votes at the convention, the process would be concluded. We had arranged that the full roll would be called and that Vermont would pass its turn to be in the final position. Then, when the Vermonters had voted, Bernie would rise and move the nomination of Hillary Clinton. Importantly for our delegates, the actual voters of each delegation as cast would be preserved in the record. It was a point that we had negotiated hard to protect.
As the roll was called, the various states would cast the aggregate vote of both pledged delegates and superdelegates. In many cases, this made it seem as if Hillary Clinton had won states that Bernie had won by wide margins. In retrospect, having each state report the votes individually was something we should have tried to negotiate.
The most emotional moment of the night came when Larry Sanders, Bernie’s brother, cast the final vote for Democrats abroad. He spoke about his parents, their hard lives, their young deaths, and their love for Bernie. And he spoke of their love of FDR’s New Deal and the pride they would have felt knowing that Bernie was renewing that tradition. Sitting with family, staff, and supporters in his box, Bernie visibly fought back tears. So did many of the rest of us in the hall. With all the pomp and parade going on, and all the vetted speeches, it was a truly genuine moment in one of the most scripted events you can find—a presidential nominating convention. In all my years with Bernie, I had never seen him so moved in public.
When Vermont was about to cast its votes, Bernie moved to where the Vermont delegation was sitting. After their votes were cast, he rose to the microphone: “I move that the convention suspend the procedural rules. I move that all votes, all votes cast by delegates, be reflected in the official record, and I move that Hillary Clinton be selected as the nominee of the Democratic Party for president of the United States.”
Congresswoman Marcia Fudge, who was presiding, then put the motion to the convention. It was loudly seconded by the assembled delegates. By a thunderous voice vote, the convention approved Bernie’s motion. And in that one split second, like a light going out, the campaign that for me had begun back in the Thunder Grill over a year before—and in many ways back in 1986—was over.