Bernie Sanders Sets Aside Firebrand Role for Rare Turn as Party Unifier
Bernie Sanders took on a somewhat new role in his address to the Democratic National Convention – that of party unifier.
(Bloomberg) -- Bernie Sanders took on a somewhat new role in his address to the Democratic National Convention on Monday night -- that of party unifier.
Four years ago, delegates who supported him and his progressive movement picketed and booed at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, protesting a party and nominee they believed had rigged the nominating contest against their candidate.
But this year, Joe Biden and his campaign have been actively courting him and his supporters as well as those of Senator Elizabeth Warren, the other progressive primary rival. In return, Sanders, Vermont’s junior senator, has been unswervingly supportive of Biden, keeping his fans focused on defeating President Donald Trump despite policy disagreements with the nominee.
“My friends, I say to you, and to everyone who supported other candidates in this primary and to those who may have voted for Donald Trump in the last election: The future of our democracy is at stake. The future of our economy is at stake. The future of our planet is at stake,” Sanders said.
“We must come together, defeat Donald Trump and elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as our next president and vice president,” he told his supporters. “My friends, the price of failure is just too great to imagine.”
Sanders acknowledged that he and Biden have differences on policy but said the Democratic nominee would still make progress on Sanders’s goals, from universal health care to raising the minimum wage.
Biden’s team worked with Sanders’s to form a half-dozen policy task forces that helped guide the convention platform process, though the ultimate result looks much more like Biden’s agenda than Sanders’s. There’s no embrace of Medicare for All or endorsement of the Green New Deal.
And though Harris was not the most progressive woman under consideration to be Biden’s running mate, she was Sanders’s preferred choice, a person familiar with his thinking said. He, like Biden, saw the California senator as the best boost for the ticket’s chances against Trump.
Sanders’s camp declined to comment about the senator’s preferences.
Sanders acknowledged on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that he and his supporters “surely did not” get everything they wanted. But if Biden’s proposals become policy, “Joe Biden will become the most progressive president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And that, in this moment, is what we need.”
There is still support for the Sanders agenda, something he pointed out on Monday. “Our campaign ended several months ago but our movement continues and is getting stronger every day. Many of the ideas we fought for that just a few years ago were considered radical, are now mainstream,” he said.
While Sanders handed the convention spotlight to Biden, his delegates voted for him on the written ballot for the nomination and some are casting votes against the platform, including California Representative Ro Khanna, arguing that it is insufficiently progressive.
There were some other cracks in the unity. A group of 225 young delegates submitted a petition to the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee asking for Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to have more than a one-minute speaking slot.
And Ocasio-Cortez and former Ohio governor John Kasich exchanged jabs, with Kasich saying she doesn’t represent the Democratic Party and Ocasio-Cortez responding that Republicans shouldn’t determine the Democrats’ direction.
But Sanders conveyed a message of unity on Monday.
“As long as I am here, I will work with progressives, with moderates and, yes, with conservatives to preserve this nation from a threat that so many of our heroes fought and died to defeat,” he said.
Biden and Sanders have a closer personal relationship than Sanders had with Hillary Clinton, and that’s another factor in his more supportive stance. They’ve spoken regularly since Biden secured the nomination, said Jeff Weaver, a longtime Sanders adviser who’s running a super-political action committee aimed at encouraging progressives to vote for Biden.
Sanders’s team summed up his approach in a Monday fundraising email to his supporters with a simple refrain repeated thrice: “Donald Trump must be defeated.”
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