Thursday, July 28, 2016
This time, I was an observer on assignment for Seven Days. Back then, I was a 19-year-old activist from Fairfield University in Connecticut taking part in demonstrations sponsored by Students for a Democratic Society.
Despite profound shifts in political circumstances over the past 48 years, some strong similarities are evident between the context and content of the events in Philadelphia and Chicago.
In both cases, Democrats were meeting to choose a candidate to succeed an incumbent Democratic president — Barack Obama now, Lyndon Johnson then. The party’s establishment was determined to nominate an experienced, moderate liberal — former senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton now, former senator and sitting vice president Hubert Humphrey then.
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Wednesday, July 27, 2016
"He said, 'I need your help. Would you be willing to nominate me for president?'" the classical singer recalled.
Nelson, who had traveled to Philadelphia to serve as a Vermont delegate to the Democratic National Convention, obliged. Hours later, she stood onstage at the Wells Fargo Center to formally second Sanders' presidential nomination.
"I have never felt the Bern more than I do this moment," she told thousands of cheering Democrats. "We will never stop working for a future we believe in. We will never stop fighting for the change we need. And we will never forget the man who leads us."
The next afternoon — halfway through the convention — she was on her way home to Vermont.
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"What we are dealing with now is something kind of unique — and I believe, quite honestly, the worst Republican candidate in the modern history of the United States of America," Sanders told a breakfast crowd at a Wyndham Garden Hotel near Philadelphia International Airport. "What makes him unique and extremely dangerous is he is a demagogue."
Sanders reminded the delegates from Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine that before Trump ran for president he repeatedly questioned whether President Barack Obama was born in the United States.
"It was about undermining the legitimacy of the first African American president in the history of our country — that he should not be president because he is African American," the senator said. "And that is disgusting. And that is the kind of person that we are running against."
Sanders made his remarks the morning after delegates to the Democratic National Convention — with an assist from Vermont — named former secretary of state Hillary Clinton their presidential nominee.
"As of yesterday, I guess, officially our campaign ended," Sanders noted during the breakfast.
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In a bid to unify a fractured Democratic Party, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Tuesday motioned for rival Hillary Clinton to be named its presidential nominee.
The dramatic gesture formalized Clinton’s status as the first woman to win the nomination of a major American political party. It reframed Sanders as a team player for a party he had yet to join. And it began the reconciliation required after a long and divisive primary.
The senator from Vermont made his motion at the end of a state-by-state roll call inside Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center. One by one, party activists and elected officials from Alabama to Wyoming delivered their delegate counts — with a bit of local color.
One delegation, from the group Democrats Abroad, turned over its microphone to Sanders’ older brother, Larry, who has lived for decades in the United Kingdom.
“I want to read, before this convention, the names of our parents: Eli Sanders and Dorothy Glassberg Sanders,” he said with tears in his eyes. “They did not have easy lives and they died young. They would be immensely proud of their son and his accomplishments.”
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Tuesday, July 26, 2016
"Any objective observer will conclude that, based on her ideas and her leadership, Hillary Clinton must become the next president of the United States," Sanders told a capacity crowd at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia. "The choice is not even close."
It was a message some Sanderistas still weren't ready to hear. Throughout the first night of the Democratic Party confab — even during their candidate's primetime address — a small number of them jeered Clinton whenever her name was uttered.
Sanders acknowledged their heartache and confessed that he shared it.
"I understand that many people here in this convention hall and around the country are disappointed about the final results of the nominating process," he said. "I think it's fair to say that no one is more disappointed than I. But to all of our supporters, here and around the country, I hope you take enormous pride in the historical accomplishments we have achieved."
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“I wanted to be a witness to this, to be a part of this history,” said Erin Stillson-Wolf, explaining why she, her husband and their two children, ages 3 and 10, had traveled to Philly from Jonesville, Vt., in a camper van. Bernie Sanders had inspired her to “spread some hope,” the 30-year-old mom added.
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Monday, July 25, 2016
At a rally an hour earlier, Sanders delegates had booed the senator when he uttered presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's name. But Weaver said he didn't expect the episode to repeat itself when the convention formally began.
"There were a lot of other people besides our delegates in the room today, so it was not clear to me who it was that was doing it," Weaver said of the booing. "But I expect all of our delegates to handle themselves with decorum inside the Wells Fargo Center."
Asked whether he worried Sanders supporters would refrain from supporting Clinton, the Highgate and St. Albans native said, "No, I think people in the end will realize the danger that [Republican nominee] Donald Trump poses."
Watch the video here:
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The moment of disunity came as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) gave a pre-convention pep talk to an electrified crowd of delegates at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. After celebrating the successes of his insurgent presidential campaign, the senator from Vermont turned his attention to the general election.
"We have got to defeat Donald Trump!" he shouted. "And we have got to elect Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine!"
The crowd erupted in a chorus of boos that lasted for close to a minute. Sanders raised his right arm in an effort to quiet his most fervent supporters.
"Brothers and sisters," he started. "Brothers and sisters, this is — this is the real world that we live in. Trump is a bully and a demagogue."
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Jill Stein, the Green Party’s likely presidential nominee, has come to Philadelphia to crash this week's Democratic party.
The Harvard-trained physician is working to recruit disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporters, several hundred of whom have traveled to the City of Brotherly Love to protest the Democrats’ likely nomination of Hillary Clinton. The 66-year-old Stein is urging them — as well as their hero — to abandon the party of the Clintons and to carry on the political revolution under the Greens’ banner.
Most members of the “Bernie or Bust” brigade share Stein’s view of the Democratic Party as a corrupt institution that conducted a rigged primary election. Hacked emails written by Democratic National Committee staffers “confirm people’s worst suspicions that the DNC in fact sabotaged Bernie’s campaign,” Stein said in an interview Sunday at the Green Party’s modest office on a working class residential street in West Philadelphia.
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Sunday, July 24, 2016
“Hell no, DNC, we won’t vote for Hillary!” fist-shaking marchers chanted along the first half of a 3.5-mile route from Philadelphia City Hall to Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park near the barricaded convention hall.
“If we don’t get it, shut it down!” the Sanders diehards also threatened.
Some suggested in interviews that there is still hope of the Democrats turning to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Tuesday night, delivering victory to the Vermont socialist as an act of penance for what many of his supporters maintain was a rigged primary voting process. Failure to right that perceived wrong will mean trouble in Philly, the more militant protestors seemed to suggest.
WikiLeaks’ publication of hacked emails written by Democratic National Committee staffers showed they are “not a bunch of crackhead conspiracy theorists,” said Los Angeles artist Alex Schaefer. Some of the leaked messages confirmed Sanders’ complaint that the nominally neutral Democratic Party hierarchy was actually working to ensure Clinton’s nomination.
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