Hillary Clinton last week began a push to declare herself the Democratic nominee, telling reporters that “there is no way” that she won’t clinch the party’s vote before the Democratic National Convention.
But as she ducked questions about super-delegates on Sunday news programs and fell behind Trump for the first time in a series of weekend polls, Bernie Sanders, who most Dems hoped would have gone back to puttering around his Vermont cottage and thrift shopping for polyester dress pants, declared war on his own party—and its leadership.
Meanwhile, Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has a progressive primary challenger for her House seat, Tim Canova. While polling still favors Wasserman Schultz, Canova is getting national attention. On Sunday, Sanders, clearly intent on breaking up with the party for good, threw his unqualified support behind Canova, declaring in a fundraising email that “[t]he political revolution is not just about electing a president, sisters and brothers. We need a Congress with members who believe, like Bernie, that we cannot change a corrupt system by taking its money.”
Bernie also said that, should he become president, he would not reappoint Wasserman Schultz to chair the DNC (though there’s literally no chance of that happening).
As for Wasserman Schultz, well, she’s putting the screws to Sanders in any way she can. She and DNC leaders are looking for rule changes that will prevent Sanders’ DNC delegates from disrupting the national convention the same way they did the Nevada state convention last week.
Wasserman Schultz cited the embattled Nevada Democratic Chairwoman Roberta Lange, who received verified death threats from Sanders supporters, as proof that Sanders backers simply couldn’t be trusted to behave with decorum. “Any one of us could be Roberta one day,” Wasserman Schultz said in a speech Saturday. “But none of us are going to stand for it.”
Of course, she then insisted that the Democratic party breakdown, which seems to be a contributing factor in Donald Trump’s continued rise in popularity, was all a media fabrication. According to CNN, she made fun of the “media’s love affair with notions of party discord” and said she was “confident that we will channel the passion and energy from our primary into unity behind a common purpose.”
