May 25 2016

How Influential Will Sanders’ Picks For The Platform Committee Be?

We’ll see, but the answer is likely to be, “Not very.”

There are a couple of problems, the primary one (not a pun) is that nobody pays a damn bit of attention to platforms anyway, except of course your opponent, who will thoroughly analyse every piece of punctuation to see if any out of context snippet can be used to rally their base, influence swing voters (not that there are that many of them really), or suppress your turn out. Candidates in general don’t consider the platform binding on the campaign at all, they won nomination with their own agenda and why fix what ain’t broke?

If you doubt the truth of this consider how many times Candidates have disavowed their Party Platform during the General Election if it proved inconvenient and how few have actually kept their promises once safely elected.

The other big problem is that Sanders’ picks don’t have enough votes. He has 5 of 15, Clinton 6, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz 4. Now when you look at some of the picks, I’ll leave it for you to speculate on how easy it is to get a majority coalition on any contested issue.

Most of my information comes from this Salon article by Ben Norton, the links go to each individual’s Wikipedia entry except for Deborah Parker, Paul Booth, and Bonnie Schaefer, who do not currently have Wikipedia entries.

Members of the Democratic Party Platform Committee

Bernie Sanders

Hillary Clinton

Debbie Wasserman Schultz

3 comments

  1. Vent Hole

    • TMC on May 25, 2016 at 16:57
    • #

    I would pay for a ticket to watch any committee cornel West on it. The man is awesome

    • TMC on May 25, 2016 at 17:51
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    Chaerlie Pierce is pointing out that Debbie Wassermn Schultz has become a such a distraction that even some of Clinton’s supporters are willing to sacrifice Debbie for the sake of a peaceful convention.

    However, the process is not over. And it may yet involve evicting Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz from the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, where she is still employed for reasons known only to god. Those snoops at The Hill have found a few Democratic senators who see the defenestration of DWS as a small price to pay for a peaceable convention.

    “There have been a lot of meetings over the past 48 hours about what color plate do we deliver Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s head on,” said one pro-Clinton Democratic senator.

    Of more interest, however, is the possibility that removing DWS, who currently is running the ball for payday lenders, would be an important demonstration that the party is on board with continuing serious reform of the country’s financial sector. Senator Professor Warren is in the middle of that fight, since DWS’ support for payday lenders has included an attack on new regulations for that sector proposed by Warren’s beloved godchild, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. Since, generally, the payday loan business is the toxic residue you scrape off the bottom of the financial sector’s barrel, Warren has been conspicuously critical of it, and of the (ahem) politicians who carry its water. (These, alas, include Patrick Murphy, the odds-on favorite to be the Democratic nominee to replace Marco Rubio in the Senate from Florida. Glurg.)

    Any notion that, by implication, SPW thinks the party can do better than DWS as a chairperson during a time when the party’s chief identity crisis involves its relationship with Wall Street is not coincidental.

    Not to mention DWS horrific track record of getting Democrats elected and her blatant lack of support for Democratic challengers to her Republican friends. Here’s hoping she loses her seat to a real Democrat Tim Canova in the August primary

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