Politics With Charles P. Pierce
The End of Bernie Sanders
The system was designed to stop a campaign like his. This should be the last election where it's in place.
By Charles P. Pierce Published: May 3, 2016
Scott Olson//Getty Images
INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA—In the failing light of Monday evening, Bernie Sanders spoke to the latest of his mass rallies. It was held in the long shadow of this city's massive monument to the soldiers from Indiana who fought in all of America's wars, from the capture of Vincennes by George Rogers Clark in the Revolution, to the capture of Cuba from Spain. It was a rally like so many others, raggedy millennial goatees and long gray ponytails gathered to hear what they wanted to hear from this most unlikely messenger, a 74-year-old senator from a whiter-than-white state.
"Our ideas are the future of America. Our ideas are the future of the Democratic Party."
It is worth considering whether or not he is right about this. As flawed a candidate as she is, Hillary Rodham Clinton has run a strong and decent campaign for president. If she wins the nomination, as seems increasingly likely, she will have deserved to win it. (Of course, this also means that she will run for president against He, Trump, which nobody deserves, but that's the way things go this year.)
Nevertheless, HRC truly should be the last presidential candidate to be produced by the party dynamic that emerged in the aftermath of Walter Mondale's disastrous candidacy in 1984, and which gained strength throughout the 1980s and eventually reached its culmination in the presidency of Bill Clinton. One of the lasting institutions produced by that dynamic is the concept of superdelegates to the Democratic National Convention. Repeatedly on the stump, Sanders has railed against this system as having been designed to frustrate insurgent candidacies like his. There is no real argument to be mustered against this because Sanders is absolutely right.
For more than 40 years, the Democratic party has had an existential terror of insurgent candidacies.
The system was designed precisely in order to maintain party discipline from the top down. Democratic panjandrums were terrified of how George McGovern had "hijacked" the convention rules process at the end of the 1960s; those changes helped produce McGovern's own nomination in 1972. The results of that election struck terror in the heart of the leadership of the party. It kickstarted the New Democrat movement that produced the Democratic Leadership Council—which, ultimately, produced Bill Clinton. In between, however, the institutional Democratic Party committed itself to predictable, safe politics. It invented Super Tuesday in order to maximize the influence of conservative southern Democrats, only to have Jesse Jackson demolish that strategy in 1988. For more than 40 years, the Democratic party has had an existential terror of insurgent candidacies.
In fact, it thoroughly reinvented itself principally to eliminate the possibility. In 2008, finally, Barack Obama and his campaign found ways to hack the system from within because the institutions of the party had made it virtually impossible to do it from outside. Meanwhile, of course, due to the gradual encroachment of the prion disease into its higher functions, the Republican Party apparatus became nothing but insurgencies, one after another—from Pat Buchanan submarining George H.W. Bush to the rise this year of He, Trump. This produced a serious enthusiasm imbalance between the two parties.
On MSNBC yesterday, John Heilemann interviewed Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the mysteriously still-employed chairman of the DNC, and he pressed her on whether or not Sanders was right about the functions of the superdelegates. DWS ducked and dodged, clinging to the notion that the rules are the rules, and that all the candidates knew the rules when the process began, etc. etc. This is all true, and it's not what Heilemann asked. He asked for the purpose of the superdelegate system.
The purpose of the system is to eliminate the possibility of insurgent candidacies like the one mustered this year by Bernie Sanders.
There was something elegiac about the rally in Indianapolis, the usual talking points a little bluesier than usual as the sun fell on the last night of the campaign. There are calls in the wider world for Sanders to drop out of the race, or at least to temper his attacks on the putative nominee lest he somehow convince undecided voters to hand the Republic over to a vulgar talking yam. There is no reason for him to do so. The polls are relatively close in Indiana and, even if they weren't, his voters deserve a chance to vote for him, whether that is futile or not, because what they say matters. Night falls on us all. Ultimately, damn his eyes, Dylan Thomas was more right than he knew.
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Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.