Bernie Sanders Stays Cranky to the End
By Andrew Rosenthal
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PHILADELPHIA — The slow-motion withdrawal of Bernie Sanders and his increasingly obnoxious Bernie-or-Busters was not actually the first clenched-teeth confrontation between a losing leftie and a winning Clinton.
In 1992, Jerry Brown refused to withdraw from contention despite the fact that Bill Clinton had beaten him by a huge margin. Governor Clinton retaliated by denying Brown a speaking slot on the podium that year, and Brown had to resort to seconding his own nomination in order to speak at the convention in New York.
Twenty-four years later, Brown enthusiastically cast the majority of his state’s 551 votes for Hillary Clinton today, while Sanders grimaced from his perch in the V.I.P. section of the Wells Fargo Arena in Philadelphia.
Sanders went into the convention with more than three times as many delegates as Brown won in 1992 (1,831 for Sanders; 596 for Brown), and he earned his prime-time speaking slot on Monday.
But he seems to have lost control of his own cult of personality. (His own followers booed him in Philadelphia on Monday when he suggested that they might actually want to support Clinton to avoid having Donald Trump in the White House.)
It may be too late for Sanders to tame his following now, but that problem is largely of his own making. Sanders took far too long to concede that he lost the nomination race, and his endorsement speech for Clinton was a case study in churlishness. He talked mostly about himself and encouraged his supporters to go on fighting.
When he took the stage at the convention on Monday night, he didn’t do much better. Sanders belted out something like his usual stump speech, taking about 14 minutes to even mention the words “Hillary Clinton.”
He did praise Clinton’s position on big issues, but gave the impression that he mostly wanted to take credit for getting her to agree with him. “It is no secret that Hillary Clinton and I disagree on a number of issues,” he said, and added: “But I am happy to tell you that at the Democratic Platform Committee, there was a significant coming together between the two campaigns.”
The platform? Seriously? The last time any candidate mentions the platform is on the day it is adopted. The job Sanders had to do was to get his followers to realize that if they stay home on Election Day, they will be helping Trump, especially the young ones who tend not to vote in large numbers anyway.
He said it, sort of, in the middle of his long speech. “If you don’t believe this election is important, if you think you can sit it out, take a moment to think about the Supreme Court justices that Donald Trump would nominate and what that would mean to civil liberties, equal rights and the future of our country,” he said.
Then he skated on to talk about all the people he met during the primary campaign who really loved him.
Then Sanders forced the convention to go through a long, tedious roll call vote on the convention floor today — eight years after Clinton interrupted the 2008 roll call and moved to nominate Barack Obama by acclamation.
Perhaps Sanders was too worried that his supporters would riot if he did something like that. Or maybe he’s just too cranky.
In any case, Sanders waited until the very end of the long roll call — when even his own state had voted — to move that the “official record” show that Clinton won by acclamation.
Exit Bernie Sanders, stage left.
Andrew Rosenthal is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times. |
