The Democratic convention in Philadelphia got off to a chaotic start Monday as Bernie Sanders supporters vented their (negative) feelings about presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton, a Wall Street-backed war hawk who loves money.
The chaos was, in part, caused by Sanders’ delegates to the convention, who were more unruly than one might expect from official Democratic Party delegates. One reason for this, according to a Vox report, is that the party officials who typically serve as delegates to the convention were afraid to represent Sander because they feared the wrath of a vengeful Hillary:
Everyone was so afraid to cross Clinton by serving as a Sanders delegate that he couldn’t convince the kind of party loyalists who normally take the job to do it.
Evidence suggests that their fears were not unfounded. A 2014 report published in Politico detailed the extensive “hit list” Hillary and her team compiled after ending her 2008 presidential campaign to ensure that “friends could be rewarded and enemies punished.”
For Hillary, whose loss was of course not the end of her political career, the spreadsheet was a necessity of modern political warfare, an improvement on what old-school politicians called a “favor file.” It meant that when asks rolled in, she and Bill would have at their fingertips all the information needed to make a quick decision—including extenuating, mitigating and amplifying factors—so that friends could be rewarded and enemies punished.
Michelle Obama, in her widely praised address to the Democratic convention Monday night, praised Hillary for the way she dealt with failure in 2008. “When she didn’t win the nomination eight years ago, she didn’t get angry or disillusioned,” said the First Lady.
Not in public, anyway. Hillary simply gathered her aides together in a room to compose an extensive “hit list” of enemies who deserved to be punished. And now, eight years later, Democrats are still terrified of getting on her bad side.
That’s one way to achieve party “unity.”
