Inside the Convention: Day Zero
July 24, 2016
I arrived in Philadelphia on Sunday evening, the eve of the 2016 Democratic National Convention. I was supposed to fly in on Saturday, but due to some kind of router failure, Southwest Airlines canceled thousands of flights.
In some ways, I was relieved to have another day before entering the fray in Philly. I had planned to pack and prepare for the convention on Friday, only to spend much of the day glued to my iPhone as game-changing revelations unfolded on social media.
The night before, Trump had concluded a shit-show of a Republican Convention with a horrifyingly neo-fascist speech, centered around restoring “law and order” on Day One of his presidency. Many of us were perhaps beginning to come around to Bernie’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton; realizing that no matter what we thought about her trustworthiness or integrity, we had to stop Trump at all costs to ensure our movement could even continue.
And then this.
And this.
And this.
And to top the whole day off, this.
As one Bernie organizer put it, Friday “blew the lid off” the Democratic Convention.
We were all anticipating a VP announcement, and wanted to see in her choice a sign that Clinton was ready to “walk the walk” in uniting both sides of the party (after all, the Sanders wing ultimately garnered 46% of the vote — no small feat for what can only be described as an “insurgent” campaign). The Democratic Party Platform, where Bernie’s movement won some significant victories in Orlando the week before, would simply serve as a guide for the party, a non-binding statement of intent. That statement was symbolically important, but not as convincing to the Clinton skeptics as a strong progressive VP choice would have been.
But here we have Tim Kaine, a guy I hear is a real stand-up person, but who was also one of only a dozen or so Democratic senators to vote for fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership (forcing a straight up-or-down vote, no amendments), a senator who supported some deregulation of banks, and who at one point was for right-to-work in his state of Virginia. I get all the reasons why he “makes sense” in a classic Clinton strategy that involves “moving to the right” for the general election.
But this isn’t a normal election year, and the independents who flocked to Bernie didn’t do so because he’s a safely moderate white guy. They did so because they trusted him, because he was speaking truthfully about their economic reality, because he was railing against the corruption of big money in politics. And most of all, he was walking the walk — rejecting the corrupt campaign finance system altogether in a national campaign for President.
So that VP choice was already going to get pro-Bernie progressive activists riled up. But then, Wikileaks.
For the past year, Bernie supporters already knew the DNC didn’t want him in the race. No other Democrat currently holding elected office dared to run against Hillary Clinton. Not a single one. In fact, most of them had lined up behind her before a single vote had been cast — 400 superdelegates made it clear upfront they were #WithHer. Debbie Wasserman-Shultz was co-chair of Clinton’s 2008 campaign, and was conveniently installed as chair of the DNC in 2011 (also interesting that none other than Tim Kaine stepped aside to run for Senate, vacating the spot). There were only six primary debates scheduled, many on odd dates and times that would draw a smaller audience than primetime slots. I could go on, but the point is we all already knew that the DNC under the leadership of Wasserman-Shultz had no love for Bernie—the Independent (“not even a real Democrat!”) who was single-handedly threatening to upend Hillary’s smooth sailing to the White House.
But for hardcore Berners, the Wikileaks emails at last provided validating, cathartic proof that it was happening all along. They proved this was never a fair fight; that the DNC colluded with the media; that they bounced around ideas for how to “out” him as an atheist. To so many Bernie supporters, these emails proved it once and for all: the whole game was “rigged.”
“Rigged.” It’s a word that has been thrown around a lot this election, and I suspect it means different things to different people. To some, “rigged” means the DNC literally stole votes through outright election fraud (something that many Bernie supporters believe did indeed occur). To others, the word “rigged” is used to describe how the DNC tipped the scales—in ways small and large—in favor of Hillary Clinton. I’ve not yet seen convincing enough evidence that the former occurred (though discrepancies between exit polls and final tallies in several states are eyebrow-raising).
But I do think Wikileaks provides sufficient evidence that the DNC had no interest in playing a neutral role in this fight. Clinton was always going to be the nominee. In 2008, when a little-known candidate named Barack Obama captured the hearts and minds of young Americans, drawing record crowds and record donations, the DNC (and many superdelegates) threw their weight behind him. But this year, when the Sanders campaign drew the same record crowds and record donations — on an even larger scale — they did the exact opposite. The Bernie campaign failed in many ways as well (in particular reaching African Americans in the south)…but no one can argue the media or DNC got behind the Sanders phenomenon the way they did with Obama.
So whatever your idea of “rigged,” if you believed the DNC never wanted Sanders to succeed, here was your evidence. And people were furious. They no longer wanted to participate in a showing of “unity” in Philadelphia. As many delegates declared online, they wanted to “raise hell.” When Debbie Wasserman-Shultz announced her resignation on the eve of the convention, only to be welcomed as an “honorary chair” of Clinton’s general election campaign, it was viewed as both an admission of guilt and proof that she and Clinton were colluding the whole time.
So that was the backdrop when I arrived in Philadelphia Sunday night. I grabbed a drink and a vegan Philly cheesesteak (yes it’s a thing) with my friend Dionne, and then headed to an impromptu meeting of the California Sanders delegation in a common area of the Downtown Marriott Hotel (where most of us were staying).
My first thought was that there were so many of us. Even for an impromptu, word-of-mouth, not-everyone-knows-about-it meeting, there were at least 100 delegates all gathered in a circle around our delegate leaders.
These leaders were not from the Bernie campaign. These were fellow Bernie delegates whom we elected after self-organizing online.
Many of us campaigned in our districts to become Bernie delegates because we hoped we’d serve a crucial purpose at the convention — that we’d provide pressure and votes for any contentious planks of the party platform or rules committee that came to a “floor fight.”
But the week before in Orlando, and the on the previous day in Philly, both the platform and rules committees reached “unity” agreements — compromises that satisfied both campaigns and prevented any minority reports coming up for a vote on the floor of the convention. So here we were, 1900 Bernie delegates in all, many of whom spent the last month fundraising to afford the exorbitant hotel rates, seething at the corruption in the Wikileaks emails and our impression that Clinton was moving “right” for the general.
Unlike Clinton’s delegates, most of us had never been delegates or come to a convention before. We had no marching orders from the Sanders campaign, or any idea what he wanted us to do. And so the group began to make up its own mind.
This first, impromptu meeting was the most chaotic. It was often hard to hear our leaders and they themselves were frazzled by the amount of delegates they had been charged with organizing. The diversity of opinions and perspectives amongst our delegation was overwhelming.
We figured out a few things — that we were all going to wear white “Bernie Peace” hats provided by the Colorado delegation on Monday, that special “Enough is Enough” neon-green shirts were coming in time for Thursday night. Some delegates were organizing a massive “No TPP” campaign, in which we would hold up signs in unison and bring attention to the issue on Tuesday night.
All in all, I didn’t walk away from this first meeting knowing exactly how Monday night would go, because none of us really knew what to expect. We knew the theme of the night was “Unity” and that Bernie Sanders himself was the featured speaker.
And we knew that we were angry. How that anger would express itself was not discussed and was not planned.
And the next day, it exploded.
Read the rest of my day-by-day account of the 2016 Democratic Convention:
The Political Revolution: An Ending and a Beginning
Inside the Convention: Day One
Inside the Convention: Day Two
