Voters are deeply cynical yet ceaselessly hopeful – that is the defining contradiction at the heart of the American electoral system. The pendulum of political perception is always in motion, and nothing draws it away from hope like scandal. That backswing is where the Democratic Party finds itself as convention week gets under way in Philadelphia.
On Friday, 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, perhaps by hackers from Russian intelligence agencies, were released by WikiLeaks. The emails lend credence to claims from Bernie Sanders and his supporters that the DNC, and especially Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, actively tried to undermine the Sanders campaign. Detente between Hillary Clinton and the “Feel the Bern” contingent has never felt so far away, and that’s good news for Republicans and their nominee, Donald Trump.
For those who follow politics closely, there is little in the highlighted emails that is all that surprising. Snark seems to be the default tone in communications from the DNC, and Clinton’s 2016 nomination has clearly been in the works since Barack Obama’s victory in 2008. What the WikiLeaks release has done is chip away doubt about the true mission of the DNC in the current campaign.
For that reason, Wasserman Schultz has stepped down – but not because she was a rogue actor. She did her job, which was to carry the party’s preferred candidate to the threshold of the White House. While it may be stomach-churning for Sanders supporters, that’s how the party sausage is made. That’s how it has always been made, and not just in the DNC.
If the establishment Republicans were more organized and got behind one candidate early on, they would have blocked outsider Trump the same way Democrats blocked outsider Sanders. That’s the point of national parties: They exist in part to make sure there’s no hostile takeover.
The U.S. political system is indeed rigged for the two major parties. That’s a fact, and it’s why Sanders had to shed his independence and latch on to the Democratic Party to begin with. A third-party run means using all of your time and resources just to get voters to learn your name, and that would have made it nearly impossible for Sanders to start a national dialogue on the issues he cares most about.
From a strategic perspective, he also knew that he could use outrage over the DNC’s devotion to Clinton as a way to rally supporters.
And he didn’t need WikiLeaks to tell him what the score was. The best chance a democratic socialist has at getting elected in America today is to point out corruption at every level, including within the party whose banner he is running under. Sanders has been making sausage, too, just a different variety.
Before the New Hampshire primary in February, the Monitor’s editorial board met with the four Democratic candidates for president: Clinton, Sanders, Martin O’Malley and Lincoln Chafee. We had no illusions about the national party’s preferred candidate, nor did they.
Each made it clear that they believed the party had a responsibility to allow all of the candidates to make their cases to the American people, and on equal footing. And that wasn’t happening, nor did it happen.
O’Malley, for example, complained often about a debate schedule that favored Clinton, which earned him the cold shoulder from Wasserman Schultz. And after winning New Hampshire, Sanders angrily pointed to the superdelegate system as proof positive candidates outside of the establishment don’t stand a chance.
Their frustration was legitimate then and is even more so now.
An earnest commitment to fairness is the best, the only path ahead for the DNC. If, that is, the pendulum is to move away from cynicism and back toward hope.