On the convention’s first night, Sen.
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Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who now serves as secretary of the Democratic National Committee, was then chosen to gavel in the full convention.
“Brothers and sisters, this is the real world that we live in”, Sanders said as he tried to quiet the crowd. “Trump has made bigotry and hatred the cornerstone of his campaign”.
While Sanders had endorsed Clinton previously, his remarks Monday marked his most vigorous and detailed praise of her qualifications for the presidency.
Al Franken (D-Minn.) reprised his former career as a comedian to skewer Republican nominee Donald Trump. But they face lingering bitterness among supporters of defeated rival Bernie Sanders and a fresh political mess of the party’s own making. The Florida congresswoman is leaving her position after publication of emails suggesting the DNC favored Clinton over Bernie Sanders, when it had pledged to stay neutral. And the head of the Democratic National Committee, just plain fired. The emails angered many Sanders supporters. The resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz as DNC chair is a “positive sign”, Sanders wrote in his email.
Sanders sent out a last-minute text message to his delegates encouraging them to “not engage in any kind of protest on the floor”.
The local reaction seemed to be a toned-down, polite version of the reaction inside the Pennsylvania Convention Center on Monday when Sanders told his delegates: “We have got to defeat Donald Trump and we have got to elect Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine”. “I wouldn’t vote for her for dog catcher”, said Melissa Arab, of Shelby Township, Michigan.
Still, Sanders delegate Courtney Rowe, 34, from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said “we are not here to disrupt for the objective of disruption”.
Enraged Sanders allies shouted down speakers, ignoring appeals from Sanders himself to project unity. “What we’ve been saying for months is obviously true: they had the finger on the scale of the campaign”, he said. “I want somebody who’s going to worry about the environment, who really knows climate change is real and is really going to do something about it”.
He added that a campaign based on 8 million small donations showed “you can run a competitive national campaign without begging billionaires”.
He said he intends to be arrested “a couple of times” during the convention. Our ideas are not insane, wild, utopian fantasies.
Protester Destine Madu, of Maplewood, New Jersey, said it doesn’t matter if Sanders, a Vermont U.S. senator, is calling on his backers to support Clinton.
Terming that move “more salt in the wound”, Subramanian said she could not say she supports Clinton at this point.
Trump also castigated Clinton for picking Virginia Sen. Elizabeth Warren, of MA.
The Clinton camp questioned whether Russians may have had a hand in the hack attack on the party’s emails in an effort to help Trump, who has exchanged words of praise with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Some Sanders delegates feel the Clinton campaign is not taking their policy concerns seriously. The New York businessman was formally nominated for president at a chaotic Republican convention in Cleveland last week. “All of us are part and parcel of the great immigration fabric”. It helps that the protesters-made up nearly exclusively of disillusioned democrats, fierce independents, Bernie or bust-ers, and anyone else who doesn’t like Hilary Clinton in a leftist way-got a head start. “Sounds familiar to me”.
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“His whole thing was, ‘Hey, we’re keeping the revolution going”.
