After announcing she will quit her role as head of the Democratic National Committee over leaked emails showing the party favored Clinton over also-ran Bernie Sanders, Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz is being pressured to avoid the party’s confab altogether.
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But many of Sanders’ die-hard delegates, frustrated with the primary process and furious with the outgoing party chair, were still weighing ways to disrupt the four-day event.
Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta added fuel to the debate Monday, saying there was “a kind of bromance going on” between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump. Mook offered no hard evidence to back these assertions, however, and when pressed by the show’s host, Jake Tapper, for details, offered only, “I think we need to get to the bottom of these facts. Experts are telling us it is, in fact, the Russians who hacked these emails”.
Wasserman Schultz might have expected a warm embrace at the breakfast of the Florida delegation to the Democratic National Convention.
“I have decided that in the interest of making sure that we can start the Democratic convention on a high note that I am not going to gavel in the convention”, Wasserman Schultz told the Orlando Sun-Sentinel.
Plenty of Sanders supporters do support Clinton now that he has dropped out of the race; a late-June poll from Reuters-Ipsos, for example, found that 40 percent of Sanders supporters said they would vote for Clinton.
The constant controversies led many in the party to believe that Wasserman Schultz had become more of a distraction than an effective leader of the party. While Sanders made a deathbed last minute conversion to the party before the primaries, Democrats had every reason to want to protect their party from a nominee who wasn’t loyal to the organization. Sanders had demanded earlier in the day that Wasserman Schultz resign.
Also unclear was whether Sanders would release his delegates and back Clinton by acclamation or whether the Sanders’ loyalists would demand a roll call on Kaine’s nomination amid concerns that he is too centrist. Expect a lot of talk about the party’s commitment to a forward-looking agenda for working Americans, especially contrasted with the racial war drums pounded by Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Sanders endorsed Clinton two weeks ago after pressing for the party platform to include a $15-an-hour minimum wage, debt-free college and an expansion of access to health care.
Pro-Sanders groups are planning to hold demonstrations throughout the week, ensuring that the divisions in the Democratic Party will remain on display even as the party’s top leaders gather to present a unified front against Trump. Clinton has 2,814 when including superdelegates, according to an Associated Press count. – Ingham County Prosecutor and former state Sen.
Angela Rye, Here & Now political strategist and a Democratic strategist.
“The Democrats are in a total meltdown”, Trump taunted on Twitter. On Sunday, Clinton said in a statement that she was appointing Wasserman Schultz as “honorary chair of my campaign’s 50-state program”.
“We saw what happened last week”, Harrison said of the moments of discord at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
Still, the number of people chanting “Bernie or Bust” has yet to reach the number of self-professed Clinton voters who bolted for Sen.
Officials said volunteers will be handing out water and the city will provide misting tents for demonstrators all week.
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Kelleher, who marched Sunday, predicted that the heat won’t keep any protesters away.
