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Bernie, Dont Endorse Hillary Before the Convention!
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Posted on Jul 11, 2016
By Lauren Steiner / LA Progressive
Bernie Sanders speaks at a rally at Town Hall in New York City. (Dennis
Van Tine / STAR MAX / IPx)
This piece first appeared at LA
Progressive(https://www.laprogressive.com/bernie-endorsing-hillary/) .
If Senator Sanders endorses Mrs. Clinton, it should be expected that some
percentage of delegates would not show up in Philly, and many of those who
do will be harboring great resentment towards the campaign itself. Millions
of voters will instantly retreat to the resignation and despair with party
politics that they harbored before this campaign. The momentum of this
revolution will largely come to an end. Base supporters will effectively be
returned to the masses of disenchanted potential voters who justifiably feel
that most politicians cant be trusted, because they so frequently sell out
when theyre most needed. Over the last 13 months, Ive managed hundreds of
volunteers. Dozens of them have individually expressed to me and others that
they would burn their Bernie shirts if he ever endorsed the epitome of
everything were fighting against. Nobody is immune to the backlash of
endorsing the nations most corrupt politician, even the father of OUR
political revolution. Most of the 13 million people who voted for Senator
Sanders had not heard of him before he announced his candidacy. To these
people, he represents more than just the social and environmental issues
that resonate with them. He represents the very notion that there can still
be integrity in the US Congress. If he endorses the very establishment
candidate he railed against, he could lose those people to politics forever.
Posted on the Confirmed California Bernie Delegates Facebook page by a
delegate from Northern California.
As a longtime supporter and super volunteer, I would like to thank you for
fighting on behalf of the 99% and for awakening millions of people,
especially young people to the fact that establishment politics no longer
works for the vast majority of the American people. I also want to thank you
and your platform committee members for making the Democratic platform the
most progressive platform in history.
However, we all know that the platform is an aspirational document that the
President and the party can ignore. As a pledged delegate from California, I
want to go to the convention in Philadelphia in two weeks and fight for your
nomination, as I was elected to do. As such, I am alarmed by what I have
been reading about your possible endorsement of Hillary Clinton in New
Hampshire tomorrow. I am asking that you hold off on an endorsement until
after the vote, that you not place her name into nomination using a vote by
acclamation and that you exercise your option afforded you by the minority
report signed at the platform committee meeting to force a vote on the
Hightower amendment opposing the TPP in Philadelphia.
Bernie, we have met five times now. The first time in April of 2011, I asked
you to challenge Obama in the 2012 primary. By October of that year, I had
joined the Occupy movement, because I believed we needed a social movement
to challenge corporate control of our government and our economy. While the
Occupy movement did not get involved with electoral politics, it is widely
credited with changing the national conversation and setting the stage for
your candidacy in 2016.
In October of 2014, I asked you to consider running as an Independent so you
could lead a movement and not just an electoral campaign. You replied that
you had heard that from many people and were considering it.
Six months later, when you decided to run as a Democrat, I understood why.
You know that third parties are marginalized in this country. You believed
that you needed to be included in the debates and get covered by the media
to get your message out. Ironically, the DNC stacked the deck against you by
limiting the number of debates and scheduling them on holiday weekends or
opposite football games. And the corporate media barely covered you. (A
recent Harvard
study(http://usuncut.com/politics/harvard-study-media-primaries/) showed
that this lack of coverage hindered your chances of becoming the Democratic
nominee; whereas constant coverage of Trump led to his becoming the GOP
nominee.)
Even so, through the sheer power of your authentic, consistent and
compassionate message, you were able to lead a movement, and millions of
people from all generations responded to your call for a political
revolution and volunteered for your campaign. You won 13 million votes, 23
states and 45% of the delegates, unprecedented in the modern history of
insurgent campaigns.
When you ran as a Democrat, I and many others, defended you against
naysayers on the left who said it is impossible to lead a revolution from
inside one of the two corporate parties, citing the failures of Jesse
Jackson and Dennis Kucinich. They went further and said you were sheep
herding people into that corporate party only to eventually turn around and
endorse Hillary Clinton if you were to fail to get the nomination. I said it
was my goal to get people who only come out every four or eight years when
they get excited about a candidate to become activists on the issues like
fracking and the TPP.
However I realized while many people parroted your slogan Not Me, Us, they
were still looking to you for leadership. Few were joining the fights, at
least here in Los Angeles. They were waiting for you to stop the TPP when
you got elected. People worked very hard on your campaign. However, it was
not enough to get you the nomination.
Many of your supporters decried sabotage by the DNC, the unfairness of the
super delegate system, insufficient and disparaging coverage by the
mainstream media and election fraud in many states. In the end, they pinned
their hopes on the FBI recommending a Clinton indictment, the California
recount flipping the state to you or your taking up Jill Steins offer to
top the ticket of the Green Party. Much wishful and even magical thinking
ensued. Even now people refuse to believe that you could possibly endorse
Clinton tomorrow, calling it more media lies.
I know that you are a man of your word and that if you could not win the
nomination, you would eventually endorse Hillary Clinton. However, you also
promised your supporters that you would take this fight to the convention
and that you would work hard to lobby super delegates to switch their votes
to you by making the argument that you have a better chance than Clinton to
defeat Trump in the general election.
After the DC primary, you decided not to send the letter you had been
preparing to super delegates. Yet we your supporters continued to lobby
them. And the 1831 delegates going to Philadelphia in two weeks plan to
continue the effort there. We ran in delegate caucuses all over the country
pledging to fight for your nomination and your platform. Right now Clinton
only has 2220 delegates, which is just short of the 2383 she needs to secure
the nomination outright on the first ballot. If you endorse her now and
agree to release your delegates and put her name up for acclamation like she
did with Obama, then we will not have a chance to lobby super delegates nor
publicly register our vote for you. We want that opportunity.
We know that you put up a valiant fight to get as many of your proposals
enshrined into the platform as possible. We are happy that there is a plank
against the death penalty, for a $15 minimum wage and for a modern day
Glass-Steagall Act, and that Hillary has come around on free public college.
However, what good is it to call for considering the impact on climate
change when there is no plank to ban fracking or oppose the TPP, which will
overturn environmental regulations?
As recently as last week, you
indicated(http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-07-06/sanders-keep
s-up-pressure-on-trans-pacific-partnership) that you would be keeping the
option open to bring the TPP for a vote on the convention floor. On
Saturday, 25% of the committee members filed the minority report needed to
do so. However, the New York Times seems to
think(http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/us/politics/bernie-sanders-democrati
c-party-trade.html?_r=2) you will abandon that fight in order to achieve
party unity. And your press release
yesterday(https://berniesanders.com/democrats-adopt-progressive-platform-par
ty-history/) [July 10] focuses on how wonderful the platform is and is
glaring in its omission of the TPP and fracking. As you know, the TPP if
passed would represent a global corporate coup détat and is probably the
most important thing to fight.
We know that you are getting tremendous pressure to endorse Hillary so there
can be party unity at the Convention. We also know from your last C-Span
interview that you would like to return to the Senate and head the Senate
Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions that Patty Murray is in
line to lead. We can imagine that the party leadership is holding that out
as a carrot over your head. Please dont bite.
Know that if they try to marginalize you for not playing ball, your
supporters will not let them. If you stay true to the political revolution,
you will get that army outside the White House supporting your proposals,
the one that you spoke about to Chris Matthews when he asked how you would
get 60 votes for any of your bills. You can still assemble that army as a
Senator even if you never endorse Clinton.
We also know that you are being pressured to endorse her in order to show a
united front against Donald Trump. You have said you will do everything in
your power to defeat Trump, because you think he is a pathological liar and
a bigot. So it seems that you feel compelled to endorse the establishment
candidate you ran against because she is the lesser of two evils. In
reality, we dont know how Donald Trump will govern. However, we do know
Clintons track record.
As such, we are confident that despite what she now says, Clinton will sign
the TPP, if elected President. We know she supports it, because her chief
strategist Joel Benenson told Lawrence ODonnell that she will not oppose it
but will renegotiate it. It is simply not possible to renegotiate it;
especially after Obama and the GOP leadership pulled every trick in the book
to get fast track authority last year over the objections of most Democrats.
Even you have quoted Tom Donahue, president of the US Chamber of Commerce,
who said Clinton is just saying she is opposed to it because you are.
Donahue said he is confident that she will sign
it(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/chamber-of-commerce-lobby_b_9
104096.html) once in office. The excuse they used in St. Louis and Orlando
to exclude it from the platform - that they dont want to embarrass Obama
because he supports it - is disingenuous.
As someone who has been fighting the TPP for four years, I have viewed you
as one of our greatest champions. Please dont let yourself be neutered like
Sherrod Brown was when he endorsed Clinton, forced to defend her commitment
to oppose it. Finally, do you really want Trump to be the one making the
case against the unpopular TPP between August and November and not the
Democratic nominee?
In any case, if you think Trump must be stopped, you certainly do not have
to endorse Clinton before the convention. Jerry Brown did not endorse Bill
Clinton at the 1992 convention, and Clinton still won in November. We
delegates were elected to fight for you and our platform in Philadelphia.
Many delegates have been fundraising and impoverishing themselves to be able
to do this. People who gave their last money every month to you are now
funding the delegates. How can we continue to fight if you give up? Please
dont make us spend all that money just to participate in a dog and pony
coronation show for the media.
Finally, we love you, Bernie, and the last thing we want is for you to be
perceived by many in the political revolution as a sell-out, just like
Elizabeth Warren was after she endorsed Clinton. Young people who flocked to
you because of their keen bullshit detectors wont buy your praise of her
after all you have said during the campaign and wont vote for
her(http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/08/why-sanders-endorsement-probably-wont-hel
p-hillary-clinton-with-millennials-commentary.html) . Your endorsement wont
gain any additional supporters, as the ones who wanted to support her
already do. The rest are Bernie or Bust.
In conclusion, I implore you listen to your delegates and supporters who
want you to take this fight to the convention as you promised. Remember that
you said in speech after speech that this is not about Bernie or any one
man. It is about millions of people standing up and saying, Enough is
enough. This country belongs to all of us not just a handful of
billionaires. We have followed your lead. Now we are asking you to follow
ours. Allow us to try to persuade the super delegates that you are the best
choice to beat Trump in November. Allow us to vote on your nomination and to
include opposition to the TPP in the platform. Please do not endorse Hillary
Clinton tomorrow.
Lauren Steiner is a grassroots activist and organizer who has worked with
Progressive Democrats of Los Angeles, the California Clean Money Campaign,
the Occupy movement, Food and Water Watch, Hunger Action LA, the LA Food
Policy Council and many other groups. She fights the privatization of public
institutions and public goods. She plans protests, organizes citizen lobby
meetings, speaks at conferences, writes articles and produces videos. She
has focused her work on fracking, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, net
neutrality and community choice energy programs. For the past year, she has
been the lead organizer of Los Angeles for Bernie Sanders trying to get him
elected and advance the political revolution he is calling for. She is a
pledged delegate for Bernie from CD 33.
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