There appears to be a cleavage at the highest level of the Sanders campaign between Jeff Weaver and Tad Devine. The latter is in the more typical mode: We’re going to keep fighting and see where things are after the run of Northeast states in the next couple weeks. But Weaver, at least based on what he said last night on MSNBC is in a pretty different place. Weaver says that if Sanders is mathematically eliminated from winning the pledged delegate race, the campaign will spend June and July lobbying Super Delegates to overrule the pledged delegates and give the nomination to Sanders.
As I’ve mentioned a few times, the Super Delegate system, at least in its current form, is unjustifiable. It’s a time time bomb sitting at the heart of the nomination process. The only saving grace is that it’s just never going to be lit. History shows that the Supers always go with the pledged winner. And if they threw the race to the non-winner, it just wouldn’t get past go. Unless there was some pretty good argument that the race for pledged delegates was in effect a tie, it would blow up the party.
This is especially the case for the Sanders campaign since democratic process, transparency and not letting the establishment choose the candidate has been at the heart of his campaign. Turning around now and asking the dreaded Super Delegates to hand Sanders the nomination is a pretty hard argument to make.
Even more problematic, since the Sanders campaign has spent months railing at the Super Delegates and the party establishment generally, it is hard to see how the Super Delegates are going to be very receptive to Sanders’ campaign entreaties. This is even more the case since, rightly or wrongly, the elected officials who make up most of the Super Delegates clearly think Clinton is the stronger national election candidate.
It’s just not going to happen, whether it should or not. And it shouldn’t. Sanders has been fighting an insurgent, anti-establishment campaign. Having lost that fight or getting close to losing it, his campaign now wants to appeal to the establishment to give him the nomination anyway. Again, there’s just no reason to think that is remotely plausible. What this really means is that Weaver plans to spend the time that needs to be spent reuniting the party further slashing apart the only conceivable nominee.
I’ve been careful to focus on Weaver because a lot of this does seem to be coming from Weaver specifically, rather than Sanders or other top members of the campaign team. It was Weaver, of course, who warned Clinton: “Don’t destroy the Democratic Party to satisfy the secretary’s ambitions to become president of the United States.”
Obviously, if Sanders were upset about it he could can him or tell him to cool it. And he does not appear to have done that.
Hopefully, Sanders will choose not to follow Weaver’s toxic course.
