Before anyone could second it, as its sponsors read the praises for Hillary Clinton they sought to insert, the Sanders members were on the verge of revolt. If anything shows just how out of touch the Hillary camp is in their assertion of the unity rhetoric -- it was this act of unprecedented arrogance and extreme ignorance as to the reality of the deep divide within the Party.
The boos from the Sanders camp should have been predictable. One of the two sponsors, in response to the angry reaction, asserted she was going to "use her teacher voice." She was going to lecture the young kids as to what was appropriate. This was clearly destined to end the Committee with an unmitigated disaster and defiant walk out in disgust by the Sanders supporters.
[click here to watch the video]
The Chair, Malloy, quickly shut it down stating that there was a conference taking place between the two campaign camps to work it out. He declared a five minute recess but for the next ten minutes the tensions continued to rise in the hall to a level as yet unseen in the prior two days.
"We're going to let the parties talk. There was a belief that there was an understanding." If this was true as it appears to be at least in part -- someone in the Sanders campaign itself was clearly out of touch with the reality of the situation.
Further pursuit of this course, which appears to have been attempted by the two campaigns, was not going to sit well with either the peanut gallery or the delegates on the Committee.
Chants of Bernie began to be heard. After a while one member-delegate angrily rallied some of the other delegates present and then shouted down Clinton supporters stating that they and the other delegates at home had been "working their assess off to get to Philly" with the clear intention on voting for Bernie Sanders at the Convention.
There was absolutely no unity between the camps. You can hear another firmly assert that "the delegates have not voted [on the nomination] yet." Shouts to "Withdraw the amendment" began to rise.
This was clearly not in the script -- but how anyone from either the DNC, the Committee leadership, the Clinton campaign or the Sanders campaign could not have predicted that this would be the inevitable response to the language of this amendment -- which was deemed as a personal insult and attack by the overwhelming membership of the Sanders contingent -- is simply dumbfounding to anyone who has spent any time with the Bernie Sanders movement.
In fact most of those present for the Platform Committee meeting this weekend stated to me, in plain and forceful terms, that they will never consider voting for Hillary. That their resilience had only grown from participating in or observing the platform process first hand. And that a large number of them planned on defecting from the Democratic Party immediately after the Convention.
At 12:40 a.m. this final surprise amendment was finally but reluctantly withdrawn without a second and without debate and several members moved to adopt the platform. And then things got a bit stranger.
Malloy declares "We have a couple of other things to do" before the members could go home. At that point he begins the standard thanks, compliments and congratulations from Debbie Wasserman-Schultz down to the individuals and staff who did all the behind the scenes work. The same effective speech that Maxine Waters had given twenty minutes earlier.
At this point Congresswoman Waters steps back up to the microphone returning to her earlier unity cheer-leading attempt that had originally been scripted to precede the now failed "Unity Amendment" nominating Clinton through the platform.
She declares how democratic the process was and then screams to the audience that the so-called "Unity Amendment has been pulled." "It is no longer an issue," she states as she then turns to the room, and declares "we are all Democrats." From here she attempts, several times, to get a resounding and thunderous unified applause to cheer-lead the party into a showing of unity as the two-day marathon concluded.
Her repeated attempts were met with a fairly feeble round of clapping by a portion of the Clinton camp and a resounding response of silence from the Sanders camp.
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