Bernie Sanders has battled Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination for more than a year, vowing to fight against poverty and Wall Street banks, building up a rabid following, and winning more states than pundits ever expected.
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A third of the seats on the Platform Committee were held by Sanders supporters, and the Vermont senator, who has tacitly acknowledged his campaign is finished, has made shaping the Democratic Party’s policies the last remaining goal of his candidacy. Sanders has pushed for a $15-an-hour minimum wage, while Clinton has supported efforts to raise the minimum wage to that level but has said states and cities should raise the bar as high as possible.
Allies of Clinton and Sanders pored over the 15,000-word draft of the platform on the first day of a two-day meeting in a St. louis hotel. Clinton’s side struck down that idea, noting the document included a call to “raise and index the minimum wage”.
The committee also adopted language that said it supports a variety of ways to prevent banks from gambling with taxpayers’ bank deposits, “including an updated and modernized version of Glass-Steagall”.
Sanders wants to reinstate the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which prohibited commercial banks from engaging in investment banking activities.
In a setback for Sanders, the panel narrowly rejected amendments offered by environmentalist Bill McKibben, a Sanders supporter, that would have imposed a tax on carbon and imposed a national moratorium on fracking.
“The new language breaks with the party’s practice of framing its aim of establishing a Palestinian state exclusively in terms of Israel’s interests”, he said.
Zogby said Sanders had helped craft the language that was eventually voted down in favor of Clinton’s preferred verbiage.
“For example, one of the areas that I think resonated very strongly across this country is the understanding that today, in 2016, we need to make public education include free tuition at public colleges and universities”, Mr. Sanders said. “By including parallel acknowledgement of Israeli and Palestinian rights, the party underscores its belief that the only viable resolution to the conflict-a two-state solution-requires recognizing the fates of the two-peoples are intertwined”. She has also come out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership after previously calling it the “gold standard”, but her appointees’ rejection of an amendment that would unite Democrats in opposition to the agreement fuels the suspicion that Clinton is pandering to progressives while planning to support the deal if she reaches the White House. Members of the panel said it would be wrong to undercut the outgoing president in the platform.
Only the night before Sanders had declined to refer to Clinton or formally concede defeat during a speech in NY in which he stressed that his “political revolution is just getting started”.
Sanders made no noises about conceding and insisted that he would continue to fight for a Democratic Party platform that “represents working people and stands up against monied interests”.
Sanders added that he was “disappointed and dismayed”, however, that the committee turned back a proposal by Sanders supporters that would align the party against the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The platform “reflects the issues Hillary Clinton has championed throughout this campaign, from raising wages and creating more good-paying jobs to fixing our broken immigration system, reforming our criminal justice system, and protecting women’s reproductive health and rights”, Harris said in a statement.
While appearing grudging or ambiguous to some Clinton supporters, Sanders campaign insiders say the gradual change of tone reflects a desire to exert leverage over the policy platform at the convention and migrate his huge base of backers onto a more lasting journey to reform the party’s agenda.
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He has said he remains in the race because he wants to exert influence on Mrs Clinton and push her policy positions more to the left.
